Mike Worrall’s skill is to stand at the sensory threshold, that hypothetical border between sumptuous and sinister. His large tableau paintings are maze-like journeys into surreal landscapes and, if the wrong path is taken,who know where it may lead. He invites us to step beyond the threshold into the hinterland of the human soul. Each vignette, each composition, is in itself a perfect still from an unfinished film, perhaps left as a talisman by an obscure film-maker. Each painting celebrates a cultural succession borne of the Renaissance, followed by a dash of Baroque grandeur (think Velasquez), as well as the twentieth century champions of Surrealism – think Magritte and Delvaux – who developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself and interpret dreams.

Worrall was born in 1942 in Matlock Derbyshire, UK. He has worked in the feature film industry as an “ideas artist”, and a Worrall painting famously inspired director Roman Polanski’s film Macbeth. Based in NSW, Australia, Worrall has been a practicing artist since the early 1960s, exhibiting both locally and internationally.