User:Bureau/Peter Maloney (artist)

Peter Maloney (1953 - 2023) was an Australian artist.

Biography
Born in Fremantle, Maloney moved with his family to Darwin and then to Canberra He studied at the Canberra School of Art during the early 1970s.

In 1976 Maloney enrolled in a Graduate Diploma of Painting, at Victorian College of the Arts, where he was tutored by influential Australian artists Bea Maddock and Gareth Sansom. Maloney regarded Maddock as his most important teacher whom he worked with closely and who introduced him to the work of Andy Warhol and inspired the use of photography in his work.

Maloney claimed that Sansom's "perverse nature gave me a lot or permission" in the development of his personal, confessional style of gestural abstraction. The work of Willem de Kooning and Tony Tuckson also informed his painting practice.

During a three-month Australia Council residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, 1996, Maloney began creating photographic assemblages which would go on to form a substantial part of his practice.

During the late 1980s, Maloney was directly affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. His partner of eleven years, Michael Kendall, died of the disease in 1989 and Maloney lived with HIV for the rest of his life. This experience and the loss of many friends and community members profoundly shaped his art practice. During this time Maloney lived in Sydney and worked from Wolloomooloo studio where he met artist Lindy Lee who remianed a close friend unti the end of his life. Lee wrote of Maloney's practice as an ironic take on the heroic paintings of America Abstract Expersionism, where Abstract Expressionsm "was trying to invent a language to come to termns with the horroe of World War II; Peter was finding a language through drawing that would enable him to live on the brink of the abyss he was facing" in losing so many friends to AIDS.

Maloney was selected by curator José Da Silva for the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art . His practice is represented by Utopia Art Sydney.

In collections
Maloney's work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia , Art Gallery of New South Wales , Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Australian National University, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery.