Vicarious Ground

Sean Crowley, Shopfront, 2025, Oil on jute, 198 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and CHAUFFEUR.

 

… Embodying the freedom and curiosity for civil urban design and architecture inspired by Australian suburbia, Sean Crowley has drafted in oil stick an exuberant new body of work for Vicarious Ground.  A title perfectly suited to his subjects which favours the playfulness of youth and joy of domesticity.

 

Sean Crowley, The Swing, 2024, Oil on canvas, 198 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and CHAUFFEUR.

 

Crowley has held two solo exhibitions, the acclaimed debut at Robin Gibson Gallery Sydney (2023) following on with his second solo exhibition at Egg and Dart Gallery Wollongong and his debut presentation at Sydney Contemporary with Egg and Dart (2024). 

 

Finalist in the Waverley Art Prize (2022) and the Mosman Art Prize (2022 & 2025). Collections include Macquarie Group Collection Sydney and various Private Collections around Australia. Crowley graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from National Art School, Sydney (2021).

 

Sean Crowley, Treehouse, 2024, Oil on canvas , 198 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and CHAUFFEUR.

 

 Vicarious Ground is a journey through the ethereal landscape of the imagination. 

The new body of work invites the viewer into a delicate interplay of reality and fiction questioning how the perceptions of a place are often shaped by memory and emotion more than geography. To recognise a landscape we must accept that it is not merely seen, but dreamt and then inhabited by the imagination.  

 

  Crowley, through his own observant gaze and exuberant draftsmanship captures the essence of feeling tied to a specific domestic object or familiar civil and urban structures which can illustrate how the emotion triggers our understanding of the surroundings we occupy. The nostalgia or longing for places that could have potentially once existed or never existed at all.

 

WEB     INSTAGRAM