Ivan Durrant is an Australian painter, performance artist and writer.
14 Facts About Ivan Durrant
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Ivan Durrant's father suffered from alcoholism, a factor leading to the decision by Ivan's 22-year-old mother to place the children into state care.
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From ages seven through 15, Ivan Durrant was raised in an orphanage in Brighton, Victoria.
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Ivan Durrant began drawing during his years at the orphanage, with his art providing some social advantage for him.
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Georges Mora, of Tolarno Galleries, St Kilda was among the first to see potential in Ivan Durrant's work, giving him $300 in cash to buy paints, and his first exhibition in 1970.
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Ivan Durrant's painting technique began in a childlike, folksy, naive art style, evolving into paintings of extreme Photorealism, which has come to be referred to "supraphotolism", and sculptures of illusionistic still-lives of butchered meats, pigs' heads and all.
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Ivan Durrant spent a short time working in a prosthetics laboratory at Royal Melbourne Hospital and was able to create lifelike body parts.
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Ivan Durrant's work has ranged from paintings to photography, public performance and installation art, short films and sculpture.
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Ivan Durrant is renowned for confronting the public through film, sculpture, performance exhibitions, and social realist paintings of the 1970s and 1980s.
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On 26 May 1975, Ivan Durrant dumped the carcass of a "freshly slaughtered cow" on the forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria.
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Ivan Durrant informed the staff at the NGV front desk that he was donating a sculpture, and 'asked whether they would consider leaving it in place for a few days'.
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Ivan Durrant was fined $100, with the magistrate describing the event as 'an act of ego'.
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Ivan Durrant is a regular contributor to Essentials Magazine, a Victorian High Country magazine dedicated to culture, culinary and adventure content.
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In 1969, Ivan Durrant became the first Victorian ward of the state to gain a bachelor's degree.