BETWEEN LIGHT & SHADOW
James Riches
11–28 SEPTEMBER 2025
While many turn their gaze to the grandiose vistas of the vast, open spaces of the countryside, James Riches’ paintings are a quiet celebration of the overlooked beauty in our suburban landscapes. Intrigued by the less revered corners of the city, Riches turns to his home city of Melbourne for inspiration for Between Light & Shadow–capturing the quiet streets, the soft play of light over rooftops, and the shifting hues of urban skies.
Inspired by the legacy of the Australian Impressionists, Riches’ paintings speak to a deep appreciation of the familiar, the everyday, and the strangely emotional and nostalgic connection we have to our surroundings. Through Riches’ paintings, we see our local suburbs with new eyes, not just for the steady rhythm of the everyday but as life-filled scenes that hold a deep, quiet beauty.
Please join us for a drink to celebrate the opening of Between Light & Shadow on Friday 10 September (6–8PM).
exhibition collection
Over the past twenty years, Melbourne-based artist James Riches has cultivated a quiet and sensitive approach to painting, conjuring atmospheric vistas that reward slow, introspective observation as remedy to the attention-demanding immediacy of our image-saturated world.
Trained as a drawer and now primarily painting with oils, James Riches’s small-scale impressions of suburban landscapes evoke the humble, sometimes melancholic, and nostalgic connection we share with the places we inhabit. Never painting from direct observation, Riches rescues fleeting moments from the thaw of time, allowing for the transformations of memory and imagination to turn these ephemeral lightscapes into compositional studies rich in feeling.
“I think painting has the ability to morph our moods and give us measure as our responses change over time through different stages of life.”
James Riches (b. 1973) is an Australian artist living and working in Melbourne. With a career spanning more than two decades, Riches’s work has been exhibited extensively in group and solo shows nationwide. Majoring in drawing, Riches graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT in 2008. He is currently represented by Brunswick Street Gallery.
