Lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Jonathan Dalton shares a visual language with other artists, abstracting and recontextualising their works in his own, to provoke a tongue-in-cheek commentary. Recurring references to Matisse, Hokusai, Liechtenstein, Hockney, and Warhol; and authors Austen, Salinger, and Hemingway, appear as motifs in his work. He interprets people through the objects, myths and ideas that we share, and artfully removes objects from their natural habitat, further alienating the object from its context. The paintings are metaphor-rich; his narratives are drawn from history’s endless supply of contradictions, absurdities, and failed truths.

Jonathan Dalton is a six-time consecutive finalist in the Archibald Prize, becoming one of the country’s most sought-after contemporary painters since his first solo exhibition in Australia in 2016. A major survey of the artist’s work was held at the University of Newcastle Gallery in 2023. In the same year he was included in Portraits from the Maitland Regional Art Gallery Collection.