Stef Tarasov is an Australian artist who works with a direct and unhesitant brushstroke to explore the everyday, and what may lurk beneath. 

 

Fascinated with memory and the narratives that shape us, Tarasov layers and sculpts the paint to suggest a hybrid space of both the familiar and the inscrutable.  In response to Marcus Clarke's writings on the 'weird melancholy' of the Australian landscape; and of our collective myths, notions of strange beauty and a sense of disquiet seem to creep uninvited into the works.  

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Beware when chatting with Tarasov, because as you speak, those draping folds under your eyes, that green shadow at your hairline, the crease in your neck, and that slightly speckled mole on your cheek - will be an object of lust that far surpasses your witty conversation.  

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Winner of the 2019 Clyde & Co Award, and finalist in the 2019 Muswellbrook Prize, and 2019 Mosman Art Prize, Tarasov is currently working on a series of paintings that find the beauty, the story and the slight strangeness in the ordinary and the everyday.