Image: Philip Wolfhagen, First Hallucination, 2025, oil & beeswax on linen, 120 x 96 cm

Philip Wolfhagen is one of Australia’s pre-eminent contemporary landscape painters. Wolfhagen creates images that are mysterious and sombre in mood, produced with thickly applied paint. They are inspired by the atmospheric landscape of northern Tasmania and the emotive qualities of light and weather. The son of a woolgrower, he grew up in the Tasmanian Midlands.

He studied at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, from1983 to 1987, and at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 1990. His art frequently makes reference to the work of John Constable, seeking to transpose Constable’s oil sketches into a contemporary idiom. Like Constable, he paints places he knows best, a landscape that is personal, a landscape near his home.

Wolfhagen is an artist of conviction. He seeks the immutable qualities in landscape, those elements to which human beings seem evolved to respond to emotionally.

Opening event: Thursday 12 June, 5 – 7pm