Saffron Newey
Artist's Statement
Saffron Newey is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, and digital media. Her work interrogates the impact of the Internet on the original art object and its historical legacies. Newey’s practice navigates five centuries of Western art history, drawing from the traditions of sublime landscape painting. Her works revisit impassioned vistas of mountains, seas, and skies, referencing Dutch Baroque, French Rococo, American and Norwegian Romanticism, and even the clichés of stock photography. These landscapes are digitally manipulated—through shifts in colour, format, resolution, and detail – and reimagined through painting.
Sourced from online archives, Newey’s works reflect a contemporary form of the sublime: the Internet itself. Through hyper-romanticism and visual melodrama, she transforms the anonymity and detachment of the digital realm into something deeply affective. These paintings become visual ‘power ballads’ – dedications to longing, memory, and lost connections.
Biography
Saffron Newey (b.1973) was awarded a PhD in Fine Art from RMIT University, Melbourne in 2019, supported by an APA scholarship. She is a three-time finalist in the John Leslie Prize for Landscape (2010, 2016, 2022), and has also been a finalist in the Bayside Acquisitive Art Award (2021), Muswellbrook Contemporary Art Prize (2013), and the Paddington Art Prize (2009). Newey has exhibited internationally, including her 2023 solo exhibition Future Phantoms at CICA Museum, Seoul, and the 2024 group exhibition Echoes of Eden at the Brant Mansion, New York. Publicly curated exhibitions in Australia include Pastoral Muse (Incinerator Art Space, NSW), Histrionic (Counihan Gallery, VIC), and The Ordinary Instant (Bayside Gallery, VIC). Her work has been featured in publications such as Breath: New Media Art (CICA Institute, 2024), New Romantics by Simon Gregg (ASP, 2011), and peer-reviewed journals in Australia and Europe. She is represented by Jan Manton Gallery (Brisbane), Gaia Matisse Art (New York and Los Angeles), and Curatorial+Co. (Sydney, from 2025).
