About Us

LYNDELL BROWN AND CHARLES GREEN HAVE WORKED AS A COLLABORATIVE ARTIST TEAM SINCE 1989. SINCE THEN, ALL THEIR ART HAS ALWAYS BEEN MADE TOGETHER. THEY HAVE HELD MORE THAN 40 SOLO EXHIBITIONS AND HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN MORE THAN 50 CURATED EXHIBITIONS.

In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and from 2011 worked on follow-up collaborations with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by three Australian Research Council Discovery Grants) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014).

Brown’s and Green’s works have been extensively written on and included in a many museum surveys and are in the collections of most of Australia’s public art collections and institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian War Memorial the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, as well as many major private collections in Australia and overseas. Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne and Lyndell Green is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. They are based in regional Victoria.

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green work in mixed media on paper, make oil paintings on linen (canvas), create large format photographs and paint over transparent digital prints. They were Australia’s Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007-08 and their works have been collected by most major Australian public art museums and many private collections. Since their war artist deployment, Brown and Green have created artworks that show how past wars have changed our lives and how wars continue to be fought across the globe.  Painted by layering, modifying and copying found images and the documentary photographs they gather in their fieldwork, the artists select source material for its visual charge and historical depths. When they were Australia’s Official War Artists in 2007 in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The archive of art and the turbulence of history are worlds that connect in their cosmopolitan art, along with the concept of a postnational culture. That is why their sophisticated quotation of found images are drawn from a rich archive of global visual history, for instance of the Apollo 11 moon landing gathered from NASA’s documentation and equally from the Vietnam War. The artists reorganise and sift both iconic and specific records, and their families’ histories that touched the edges of the panorama of world history. Brown & Green are intensely conscious of the tensions and the ethics of collecting, documenting and representing.  With no single event in history to pinpoint for blame, absolution or inspiration, their powerful, constructed tableaux mediate a history pinned in place by indexes of contemporary world-making across panoramic perspectives. As they say: “we have always made paintings that show how the past survives into the present.