Jennifer Allnutt
Jennifer Allnutt is an artist based in Brisbane, Australia.
She graduated from the University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) in 2011 and a Masters of Teaching in 2016.
She has been a finalist in the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize (2024) and was the overall winner of the Lethbridge Small Scale Art Award in 2024. Her work has been exhibited around Australia, the US and New Zealand.
Jennifer Allnutt’s artistic practice is best epitomised as dark romanticism and figurative surrealism.
Using the inherent luminous qualities of oil paints, Allnutt applies glazing techniques to build paintings which are high in chroma, jewel-like and play with illusionism and depth. Allnutt is interested in mimicking the delicate qualities of skin and petals in oil paint and these two subjects often feature. As well as this she has a fascination with the natural world and memento mori art.
Allnutt’s works oscillate on the line between realism and illusionism. Characterised by darkly, picturesque florals and alabaster skin, she blends a northern renaissance sensibility with an idiosyncratic use of surrealism and symbolism. Pursuing sensuality, decadence and voracious luminosity in her paintings, Allnutt pairs this with the uncanny, fear and death.
Through the process of juxtaposing death with romance, wonder with fear and the awe inherent in the sublime, Allnutt links these polarities into a dark divergence and these strange pairings fuel the deep sense of the uncanny found within the work. Her use of juxtaposition is deliberate to examine the divisions and fluidity between mind/body, man/nature, reality/representation and good versus evil.