Laith McGregor (b. 1977, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia) achieved success early in his career for his intricately drawn works, using ballpoint pen and pencil, winning the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize (2008), the Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), and the Emerging New Work Grant by The Australia Council for the Arts (2009). Since then, he has been the winner of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2018), National Works on Paper Prize (2012), and the Paul Guest Memorial Prize (2018), and a finalist in many other prizes. He has participated in numerous residencies including Art Omi New York, HIAP Helsinki, and the Barcelona Studio residency through the Australian Council for the Arts. He has exhibited extensively in Australia, internationally and is represented in significant institutional collections. McGregor was included in the recent Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2022: FREE STATE, at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, Laith McGregor’s multi-disciplinary practice reflects an ongoing inquiry into contemporary portraiture, semiotics of image making, and notions of the self. With pieces incorporating laborious, hyper-realistic illustration, accumulations of pencil and eraser shavings, and other processes that form a meditative daily ritual, his practice is resolutely underpinned by a commitment to physical studio work and the marking of time. McGregor’s works wrestle with the grey area that exists between fiction and non-fiction, negative and positive, black, and white, two- and three- dimensions, serving an ongoing inquiry into the complexities of what it means to be human. Laith McGregor Lives and works between Byron Bay, Australia, and Bali, Indonesia.

Sleepy Landscape, 2017 oil on canvas with rattan conical hat 78 x 59.84 inches (198.12 x 151.9936 cm)
Untitled, 2022 archival pigment print mounted on dibond 9.25 x 12.37 inches (23.495 x 31.4198 cm)
Untitled, 2022 archival pigment print mounted on dibond 9.25 x 12.37 inches (23.495 x 31.4198 cm)
With Milk, 2018

wood, vintage carving, and stainless steel
13.4 x 5.9 x 4.7
(34 x 15 x 12 cm)

Fortune Teller, 2018

wood, vintage carving, shot glass, and found ring
11.8 x 5.9 x 3.1 inches
(30 x 15 x 8 cm)

After Midnight, 2018

wood and found vintage carving
11 x 4.3 x 3.1 inches
(28 x 11 x 8 cm)