Collection: Peter Serwan

Peter Serwan was born in Mount Gambier in 1962 and is the son of Polish post-war migrants. As an artist, he has spent much of his life looking closely at the immediate world around him, studying and painting the places, objects and everyday moments that often go unnoticed. He trained in Fine Art, majoring in painting, at the South Australian School of Art, later teaching visual art in regional Victoria before returning to Adelaide at the end of 1996. Since then, the suburbs and streets of the city have become a constant source of inspiration.

Serwan has always painted in oil. While his subject matter has changed over the years, his approach has remained much the same. He has painted backyards and clotheslines, bus stops and piers, and more recently the housing estates, billboards and colourful bunting that come with a gradually sprawling, expanding city. His personal surroundings provide the initial starting point, but the paintings are shaped by memory, personal experience and the unexpected elements that catch his attention along the way.

‘Moving Forward’ continues this practice of looking at the outwardly familiar. The paintings turn to the everyday things that quietly become part of our lives: a house, a solitary street, an object, a passing view. They are the details we might barely notice at the time yet somehow find ourselves remembering years later.

At its heart, this body of work is about home, recollections, chance observations and memory, and about the things we carry with us as life changes. It is also about moving forward — not necessarily leaving the past behind but taking something of it with us.