Julia Castiglioni Bradshaw is a contemporary artist currently based in Sydney, New South Wales, with a practice that includes painting and ceramics. Her intuitive based practice is inspired by the many varieties of native flora and the inherent abstract qualities that characterise the natural world.
Through large gestures and broad planes of colour, Castiglioni Bradshaw’s paintings echo the metamorphose of our environmental systems, where loose painterly marks suggesting both a sense of pattern and entropy. Each composition captures the dynamic state of the natural world, using the freedom of abstraction to visualise its energy and infinite complexities. Derived from observational drawings, each work is built up through a combination of instinctive mark making and formal aesthetic decisions, its evolution guided by responding directly to how each stage develops during its completion. Though this accumulative layering of paint, Castiglioni Bradshaw’s methods and processes symbolise the organic nature of growth within living systems, as well as the passing of time.
Paintings often evolve over many months, taking on periods of suspension, before being reactivated through fast and improvisedgestures. As such, each surface appears everchanging, caught in a delicate visual dichotomy of stillness and dynamism. At the heart of Castiglioni Bradshaw’s practice is an intuitive approach, utilising a visual language that evokes a sense of transition, where moments of clarity and structure perpetually dance with vitality and chaos in search for equilibrium.
Julia Castiglioni Bradshaw completed a Bachelor in Fine Art with First Class Honours at the Australian National University in 2007, during which time she undertook six months of exchange to the Politecnica de Valencia in Spain. She has been finalist in the Glover Prize (2025) and the Lloyd Rees Art Prize (2017 & 2019).
Exhibitions
