Cynthia Breusch

Cynthia Breusch was born and raised in Brisbane and is a graduate of the Queensland College of Art. She has held over 35 solo exhibitions around Australia and participated in numerous group and ‘by invitation’ exhibitions in Australia, in Tokyo, and California. Her first international solo exhibition was in California in 2004; a painting from this exhibition was featured on the cover of a major Californian magazine.

Cynthia has won awards for both figurative and landscape work. She was a finalist in the 2022 prestigious Darling Portrait Prize (National Portrait Gallery) and the 2022 and 2018 Salon des Refusés. She is an 8-time finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Australia’s most prestigious portrait award for female artists) and was a semi-finalist in the 2022 and 2017 Doug Moran Portrait Prize. Her work has been selected in other significant award exhibitions including the Mosman Art Prize, the Paddington Art Prize, Redlands Westpac Art Prize, and Tattersalls Landscape Prize.

Her paintings and drawings are represented in the public collections of the Tweed Regional Gallery, Ipswich City Council, the Rockhampton Museum of Art, as well as the corporate collections of BHP Billiton, News Corp, the Tattersalls Club Brisbane, and the University of Queensland Press. Cynthia’s work is held in private collections throughout Australia, Fiji, NZ, Singapore, USA, UK, France, Germany and the United Emirates.

Her atmospheric paintings convey an other-worldly timelessness and evoke universal themes of meaning and purpose, memory, dreams and the transcendent. As she puts it, “I want to paint invisible things – the figure might be the motif but my real subject is the human condition and the mystery of existence…what lies beyond ordinary perception.”

Themes and titles of Cynthia’s work are influenced by her passion for classical music, ECM jazz artists, books and poetry. She has travelled widely in Europe as well as in the UK, USA, Central America and the South Pacific. These journeys inspire her, as does the World Heritage area of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, where she lives and works.