Julian Martin

Martin resides in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster, and has worked from his Northcote-based studio at Arts Project Australia since 1989, where he has also had numerous solo shows.

It was one such artist who, in the early 1990s, suggested the use of a mirror as a drawing aid, which eventually led to the development of his signature depictions of mask-like faces executed in pastel.

[4] These early works were exhibited in Martin's first solo show, entitled Pastel Drawings at the Australian Galleries in Collingwood, Melbourne.

However, in recent years his work has also achieved success in more conventional art institutions and Alex Baker, former curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria has likened his works to those of American abstract artists of the 1930s and 1940s such as Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes and Ad Reinhardt, claiming that they are similarly characterised by "pictographic, biomorphic and hard-edged abstraction".

[5] A highly prolific artist[2] whose works number in the hundreds and are stored in the archival collection of Arts Project Australia,[6] Martin's work has developed from early abstracted monochrome figures and profiles[4] into a practice which combines source material found in newspapers and magazines[2] with the bold, flattened geometric repetition of form that has become his "signature style".