Provenance: John Fairfax and Sons Pty Ltd, Sydney
Exhibitions: Young Contemporaries Blaxland Gallery 1967. Awarded First Prize
Watters Gallery Survey Show, March 1973
Literature: Grishin. S., Garry Shead and The Erotic Muse, (Fine Art Publishing, Sydney, 2001.) pp. 33, 46, 146-147, 149
Towndrow. J., Phillip Cox Portrait of an Australian Architect, (Penguin Books Australia, 1991.) p. 91

Garry Shead is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. He is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all state galleries, many regional galleries and many other public collections in Australia and overseas. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 1986 Mahlab Art Prize (New South Wales Law Society), the 1993 Archibald Prize and the 2004 Dobell Prize for Drawing.

This painting, influenced by the work of Francis Bacon, won the artist the Sydney Morning Herald Young Contemporaries Art Prize in 1967. The work was subsequently shown in the artist’s Watters Gallery Survey Show in March 1973 and then passed into the collection of John Fairfax and Sons Pty Ltd, Sydney. The Phillip Cox portrait is very close in pictorial strategy to Shead’s Lane Cove paintings of 1967.

Writing about Shead’s paintings of the 1960s including Portrait of Phillip Cox, 1967, Sasha Grishin comments on the painting’s 'expressive boldness, experimental freedom and lyrical sensuousness. Cox…is shown with wonderfully expressive long and graceful artistic hands while his head floats like a butterfly in the clouds.'
Reference: Grishin. S., Garry Shead and The Erotic Muse, (Fine Art Publishing, Sydney, 2001.) p.149