Garry Shead is an Australian artist and filmmaker. His paintings are in many galleries in Australia and overseas, and he has won several awards, including the Archibald Prize in 1992. He has spent time in Japan, Papua New Guinea, France, Austria, and Hungary, returning to Australia in the 1980s.

He was a founding member of the Ubu Films collective in the late 1960s, with whom he made numerous experimental film works,[1] and he also worked for the ABC[clarification needed] as an editor, cartoonist, filmmaker and scenic painter before his first major solo exhibition with Watters Gallery in Sydney. He was a friend of Brett Whiteley and participated in the famous Yellow House activities.[citation needed]

He has shown in more than seventy group exhibitions and had over fifty solo exhibitions, as well as illustrating numerous books.[citation needed]

He spent six months in Paris in 1973. In the 1980s he spent time in France, Spain, Italy and Holland.[citation needed]

During a residency at the Karolyi Foundation, in Vence in southern France, he met Hungarian sculptor Judith Englert, and spent a year in Budapest with her before returning to Australia. In 1987 they eventually settled in the seaside suburb of Bundeena, south of Sydney. During the late 1980s his style (figurative, allegoric, lyric, moody) crystallized with the Bundeena paintings, the Queen series and the D. H. Lawrence series. This last is based mainly on Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (novel), which was inspired by the Lawrences’ stay at Thirroul, near Wollongong. Shead became interested in Lawrence after he came across letters by the author while on an expedition with the ABC to the Sepik Highlands in Papua New Guinea in 1968.[citation needed]

The 21st century saw him branch out into a complex set of paintings celebrating the Ern Malley series of hoax poems.