Peter O'Doherty

Peter O’Doherty was born in 1958 in Auckland, New Zealand and immigrated to Australia in the late ’60s with his family. He has been exhibiting regularly for over 20 years, across Australia and internationally; he has been a part of group exhibitions across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, New Zealand and England.

O’Doherty’s work typically pinpoints ‘urban suburbia’; fibro and brick houses, blocks of flats, high-rise facades, kitchen sinks, aeroplanes and landscapes. His representational paintings are tonal assemblages of oblique geometric detail, imbued with dense shadow and vivid Australian light. Peter has won the Paddington Art Prize for Landscape, the Commendation Award at the Mosman Art Prize, and the Alan Gamble Memorial Prize for the Built Environment. He has also been a finalist in various other prizes such as the Sulman, at the Art Gallery NSW and the Salon des Refuses.

Peter’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery NSW, Artbank, Cowra Regional Gallery, Mosman Regional Art Gallery, the Union club NSW, Town Hall Collection Sydney, NERAM, Armidale and the Pat Corrigan Collection.

For two decades Peter was prominent musically, as the bass player in the band Mental As Anything. Since leaving in 1999, he and his brother Reg Mombassa (musician and illustrator) release albums together as Dog Trumpet.

John McDonald (SMH art critic, 2022) said of O’Doherty’s recent solo exhibition Somehow Connected, that “there is a nostalgia for an age of innocent vulgarity, for a time in which householders expressed their individuality with a bold colour scheme – a burst of red, blue or green that could stop passers-by in their tracks.”