Tim Gregory was born in 1981 on a Hunter Valley property that for five generations – over a hundred and fifty years – had been home to a family of viticulturalists. His mother, Estelle, was born in Nice, Southern France, before immigrating with her family to Australia in the 1950s. Estelle started a boutique winery on the property and Tim spent his formative years sketching the landscape of the region.
During his adolescence Gregory went on many trips to Europe and the United Kingdom, including one year in France, where he developed a passion for landscape painting. He was impressed by Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and the Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Gregory spent time in London’s National Gallery, the Louvre and other major galleries in Europe studying the Masters. Through his plein-air studies of European landscapes he developed a methodology and styling, which he then applied to the Australian landscape.
Upon returning to Australia in 2000 he moved to Sydney to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales (UNSW), majoring in painting. He maintained a connection to the Hunter Valley while studying in Sydney, often making weekend trips back to the family property.
While at university, Gregory experimented with a variety of techniques and media. By the time he started his honours year he had moved away from landscape painting towards theoretically informed video and time-based art. During this time he read widely in philosophy and art, being particularly drawn to the ideas of influential theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, Marc Augé and Friedrich Nietzsche. Influenced by these theorists, Gregory explored new ways of working with his chosen media through concepts that invited a social critique of gender and politics.
After graduating from Honours in 2004 he was awarded a scholarship to commence a PhD in Art Theory (2006-09) at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, COFA.
In 2008, Gregory collaborated with Elle Dixon on 'Sexdeath’, an exhibition at Chalk Horse Gallery in Surry Hills. Together Gregory and Dixon produced a video exploring the concepts of voyeurism and of public performance in personal relationships.
Gregory has written on art for a variety of art journals including Eyeline and Broadsheet magazine . In 2007 he accepted a casual lecturing position in art theory at COFA.
- Writers:
- De Lorenzo, Catherine
Dixon, Amanda
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
Media Art Histories - ARC Linkage Project 1 user
