Natasha Bieniek

Cocoon

07 Oct 2025 – 25 Oct 2025

Melbourne painter Natasha Bieniek (b. 1984, Melbourne) lets her incredibly detailed miniature paintings lasso the viewer with a quiet grace, pulling the eyes in and halting the gaze. Hers are not the kind of pictures to take in with a passing glance and it is the physical tension between the image and its audience that motivates the artist.

Bieniek succeeds in this challenge by the most anachronistic means: the miniature portrait, first prominent in 16th century Britain, later made redundant by photography and now ubiquitous in contemporary form as the mobile-device digital photographs which, like their earlier counterpart, are always on hand as a memento of social belonging. In an age of face recognition technology, an acute human likeness rendered in the labour intensive craft of oil painting captivates with its sense of time invested and timelessness.

Bieniek graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006 and received the post-graduate Nino Sanciolo Art Scholarship to study ancient painting in Florence, Italy.

She has been awarded significant art prizes including The Wynne Prize (2015), The Portia Geach Memorial Award (2015) and The Metro Art Award (2012) and is an eleven-time Archibald Prize finalist. Her 2016 Archibald Prize portrait of Wendy Whiteley was named highly commended and toured Nationally in ‘Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize’.