Leonard Brown — Painting the Celestial
Leonard Brown
Byzantine Holy Cross, with luminous terminals, the painter’s personal logo. Digital recreation by Tiffany Johnson, 2025.
28 Mar 2026 — 14 Jun 2026
Leonard Brown
Byzantine Holy Cross, with luminous terminals, the painter’s personal logo. Digital recreation by Tiffany Johnson, 2025.
| Dates | Saturday 28 March to Sunday 14 June |
|---|---|
| Times | Open daily, 10am - 5pm |
| Cost | FREE |
| Booking | Facilitated and organised groups require a booking to visit this exhibition. No bookings are required for individuals to visit this exhibition. Opening event 28 MARCH 2026 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm Ipswich Art Gallery | RSVP essential Bookings open soon |
| Age | All ages welcome |
COMING SOON - Painting the Celestial is a retrospective exhibition by Ipswich based painter, Leonard Brown.
The art of Leonard Brown is a unique phenomenon in Australian art. He is highly regarded as a painter of sublime, minimal abstract canvases and these paintings are held in major public art collections throughout Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales.
At the same time, Leonard Brown is an accomplished icon painter following the ancient conventions and methods of Byzantine and Medieval Russian icon painting. Many of his icons are consecrated and are in liturgical use in churches throughout the world as well as finding homes in domestic environments and are held in private and public art collections. He is also a figurative artist of repute and was the winner of the Brisbane Portrait Prize (2019) and has been awarded numerous other art prizes including, The Blake Prize for Religious Art (2010).
Painting the celestial is the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Leonard Brown’s work to have been presented anywhere in Australia and traces the artist’s development for more than five decades. The Ipswich Art Gallery is being transformed for this exhibition to include a gold-radiating sanctuary where Leonard Brown’s icons can be sympathetically displayed. His abstract paintings are being shown in greater numbers and in more depth than ever before. To enter the world of Leonard Brown’s art is to embark on a transformative experience. Both his painted icons and abstract works have the ability to transport the viewer to a different and more spiritual plane of existence.
Leonard Brown was born in Brisbane in 1949 and he has lived in Ipswich for the past twenty years. This spectacular and beautiful exhibition celebrates the work of one of Australia’s most significant living artists.
Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA
Emeritus Professor, Australian National University
Curator: Painting the celestial: A retrospective exhibition by Leonard Brown
An Ipswich Art Gallery exhibition
THE PAINTER
Leonard Brown, Portrait by Mick Richards
Leonard Brown
Leonard Brown is an established Australian painter whose practice moves between two distinct yet spiritually unified modes: the sacred, living tradition of the Byzantine canon of religious iconography and contemporary abstraction. Both strands of Brown’s practice are rooted in theological understandings of time, eternity, and the soul’s ascent.
Brown’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Artbank, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand; Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Bundall, Queensland; Griffith University, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland; Museum of Brisbane, Queensland; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; The University of Queensland, Brisbane; and private collections both nationally and internationally.
Leonard Brown is based in Ipswich.
Portrait of Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA in Siberia
CURATOR - Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA
Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, who works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. He studied at the universities of Melbourne, Moscow, London and Oxford and has served several terms as visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history and in 2008 was awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.
He has published over thirty books and over two thousand articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art. In 2013 his massive Australian Art: A history was published by Melbourne University Publishing, in 2015 his monographs on John Wolseley (Thames and Hudson), Inge King (Macmillan) and S.T. Gill (National Library of Australia) were published and in 2022 his books on Erwin Fabian, Murray Walker and Joyce Evans appeared in print.
Grishin’s work on Painting the Celestial: A retrospective exhibition by Leonard Brown combines his professional research interests in Australian art, Byzantine and Russian art and Russo-Byzantine Orthodox theology.