Julie Fragar

Untitled (Penny asleep), 2005
oil on canvas
60.0 x 40.0 cm
signed 'JF' (lower left)

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Provenance
Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland
Private collection, Sydney

Julie Fragar is a Brisbane based artist, whose work is often biographical, engaging the viewer in a lighthearted game of interpretation where sensuously painted fragments of mystery, banality, casual sexuality, drama and tragedy offer significance for the taking. Using photographic source material, her paintings evolve into complex and multi-layered compositions. Wayne Tunnicliffe has said her work ‘incorporates a diaristic-style intimacy.’

‘She is interested in painterly artifice,’ explains Tunnicliffe. “Hers is a snapshot diaristic style and that is very now, so her work represents what is happening at the moment. I was interested in the way she uses photography to capture a snapshot and then how she translates that into paint. She has a broad knowledge of art history, especially realism.’ (P. Gibson, ‘Art Collector’, Issue 55, January - March 2011)

  • Untitled (Penny asleep)


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Born in Gosford in 1977, Julie Fragar’s paintings multi-layered paintings blend realism with an ethereal sense of time and history. Fragar studied at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (1995-98; 2001-02), and received a PhD from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (2013). She currently teaches at the Queensland College of Fine Art as a lecturer in painting.

One of the key influences upon Fragar’s work is the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, from whom she derives a photographic style and a focus on intimate, personal subjects. Often her work is autobiographical, tracing her personal or family history. Beginning with a sense of photographic realism, she then overlays her original image with further figures, or often text, to imbue her canvases with symbolic and narrative meaning. 

In 2017, she received the Ramsey Art Prize (Lipman Karas People’s Choice Award). In the same year, she was commissioned to paint the official portrait of former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. Most recently, in 2024, Fragar received a survey of works from 1998-2021, Biograph, Rockhampton Museum of Art, Rockhampton. Fragar has exhibited since the late 1990s and her work is held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, as well as other regional, corporate and private collections across Australia.