Tony Lloyd is an explorer, of mountains, highways and in his imagination, space. His realist paintings have a cinematic majesty and a dreamlike strangeness to them. They are epic visions of landscapes at singular moments in time; sunrise creeping across a rock face; a car’s headlights illuminating the darkness, a weightless asteroid hovering in empty space.

In these paintings by Tony Lloyd, the artist evokes the uncanny in a collage of visual elements that don’t quite sit together, and that gives the pictures their palpable sense of eeriness. This is the true other and contemporary art at it’s best.

(Andrew Frost, The A to Z of contemporary art ABCTV)

Last year Lloyd spent time hiking through the Swiss Alps looking for new landscapes to paint.

All the superlative things that have been said about mountains are quite true; that their vastness is humbling, that they have a sense of the numinous, and that they are the embodiment of the sublime.

The paintings in Interglacial have come out of that time.

It has been five years since Tony Lloyd’s last solo exhibition in Melbourne and this will be his first show at MARS Gallery.

Lloyd’s works are insistently of the here and now – placing us squarely in the present – but speak of time immemorial; of all time.

(Simon Gregg, Director Gippsland Art Gallery)

Tony Lloyd is an explorer, of mountains, highways and in his imagination, space. His realist paintings have a cinematic majesty and a dreamlike strangeness to them. They are epic visions of landscapes at singular moments in time; sunrise creeping across a rock face, a cars headlights illuminating the darkness, a weightless asteroid hovering in empty space.

In these paintings by Tony Lloyd, the artist evokes the uncanny in a collage of visual elements that don’t quite sit together, and that gives the pictures their palpable sense of eeriness. This is the true other and contemporary art at it’s best.

(Andrew Frost, The A to Z of contemporary art)

Last year Lloyd spent three weeks hiking through the Swiss Alps looking for new landscapes to paint.

I climbed thousands of metres, walked scores of kilometres and took gigabytes of photographs. All the superlative things that have been said about mountains are quite true, that their vastness is humbling, that they have a sense of the numinous, and that they are the embodiment of the sublime.

The paintings in Interglacial have come out of that time.

I have been painting mountain landscapes for nearly ten years, this exhibition is by far the richest and most diverse I have done. The inspiration I took from this trip has taken my work to a new level.

It has been five years since Tony Lloyd’s last solo exhibition in Melbourne and this will be his first show at MARS Gallery.

Tony Lloyd lives and works in Melbourne. He was the winner of the Belle Arti prize and the John Leslie Art Prize. Lloyd has received Development Grants from the Australia Council and has had artist residencies at The British School at Rome, in Amsterdam and Beijing.

Since gaining his Masters degree at RMIT University in 2001, Tony Lloyd has shown widely in Australia and internationally. His paintings are in many public collections including the State Library of Victoria and RMIT Gallery and in private collections around the world.