Bett Gallery announces representation of Tasmanian painter Clifford How

Clifford How‘s practice is rooted in physical immersion in Tasmania’s most demanding environments — the wind-scoured alpine interior, remote coastlines, and exposed headlands that define the island’s wilder edges. Long hikes across the high country and solitary encounters with remote shorelines inform works built up with palette knives and other tactile tools, producing layered, sculptural surfaces that carry something of the terrain’s own geology. These are not literal depictions so much as emotional translations — the weight of mist, the force of a coastal wind, the quiet tension of weather about to turn.

A restrained palette of mauves, grey-greens, bone tones and blacks places the emphasis on surface and texture, with paint functioning as both image and object. His subjects move across glacial tarns, dolerite escarpments, tidal shelves and exposed headlands, distilling each into a moment where time, weather and memory converge.

How has presented more than fifteen solo exhibitions nationally and received significant recognition through prizes and awards, including wins at the Hornsby Art Prize (2018), the Wrest Point Art Award (2017) and the TASART Award (2016). He has been a two-time finalist in the Glover Prize, was appointed an International Ambassador for Michael Harding Oils in 2019, and his practice has been profiled in Artist Profile and featured in Amber Creswell Bell’s A Painted Landscape (Thames & Hudson, 2018).

Four new paintings have been released from the studio to mark his arrival at Bett Gallery and are available now. Enquiries via the gallery.

Clifford How’s debut solo exhibition with Bett Gallery opens 13 November 2026.