Collection: Peter Serwan

Peter Serwan was born in Mount Gambier in 1962 and has Polish heritage. He has spent most of his life since studying and painting the world immediately around him. He trained in fine art at the University of South Australia, taught visual art in regional Victoria for a number of years, and settled in Adelaide in 1996 — and it's here, in the suburbs and streets of this city, that most of his work has been made.

Serwan paints in oil, and always has. Over the years his subjects have shifted — from backyards and clotheslines to front porches, bus stops and piers, and more recently to the housing estates, billboards and bunting of a fast-growing city — but his way of working hasn't changed. His immediate environment has been a catalyst for ideas, and he allows meanings to emerge in his work based on personal experiences, recollections and chance observations.

Moving Forward continues that way of looking. These paintings return to the everyday objects and quiet moments that shape a life — the ordinary details we walk past without noticing, until one day we realise they've been holding our memories all along. This body of work is about home, about what we carry with us, and about the small, steady act of moving on.