Fred Cress (1938 – 2009)

Frederick Harold Cress AM was a British painter who migrated to Australia and won the Archibald Prize in 1988. Cress was born in Poona, British Raj, but went to England with his parents in 1948 at 10 years of age. He was educated at the Birmingham College of Art in England and migrated to Australia in 1962. Cress met the painter Anne Judell and married her in 1967; they divorced in 1991.

He started his career painting figuratively, but became well know for his abstract work in the late 60s and 70s. He returned to figurative painting in the late 80s after he won the Archibald Prize with a portrait of his friend and colleague, John Beard. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003 for services to the visual arts.

In 1990, Cress bought a 17th century stone farmhouse in southern Burgundy, France. He spent the next 20 years of his life living half of the year in France, and the other half in Sydney. Many of Cress’ later works have visual references to his time spent in France. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in January 2003. In 2009 he declined to continue with treatment while he worked on his last two exhibitions, entitled End Game One, at Australian Galleries in Melbourne, and End Game Two, at BMGART, for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, SA.