Cherry Hood

Cherry Hood is an Australian artist well known for her haunting, large-scale images of faces. Working for preference in watercolour, which she allows to flow, bleed and drip, Cherry specialises in intense depictions of mostly anonymous subjects.

With a studio based in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, she has naturally embraced her landscape surrounds, sometimes incorporating it into her figurative works.

In 2000, Cherry Hood gained her Masters Degree from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, with a thesis comprising an investigation of ‘gender politics, cultural mores and taboos surrounding the representation of the male body.’ The following year Cherry held her first solo exhibition at Mori Gallery, Sydney. Since then she has exhibited in countless solo and group shows around Australia with a gallery to represent her work in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Most notable, Hood enjoyed a sell-out solo show in New York at Dietch Projects in 2004. Cherry Hood’s international career gave her solo shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver and Zurich.

Following her Archibald Prize win in 2002 for a portrait of Simon Tedeschi ‘unplugged’, she won the Kedumba Drawing Award in 2003. Cherry subsequently had works hung in the Archibald Prize on six occasions. Amongst her portrait subjects are painters Matthys Gerber, Ben Quilty, Michael Zavros and pianist, David Helfgott. Her portrait of Tedeschi is one of relatively few Archibald winners in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Hood’s works are in leading state, institutional, private and corporate collections around Australia and in public and private collections around the world.