Emerging first as a filmmaker in the 2010s, Edward Inchbold (b. 1995) turned to painting in 2020 at the age of 25. Since then, he has presented six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows and art prizes, including the Kedumba Drawing Award (2026). Between late 2024 and early 2026, he produced a trilogy of exhibitions at Stella Downer Fine Art: Brand New People (2024), Wisteria Lemonade (2025), and Shedding Velvet (2026). These exhibitions marked a series of radical, decisive shifts in both his work and underlying philosophy. In July 2026, Hazelhurst Arts Centre presented his sixth solo exhibition, Mango Flesh Identikit (2026) in the Broadhurst Gallery. Inchbold is represented by Brenda Colahan Fine Art, who will present his seventh solo exhibition in October, 2027.

Inchbold’s work draws on his own life alongside a wide range of visual, musical, and literary sources, including his own poetry and fiction, studio observations, the history of painting, and an eclectic mix of music, literature, true crime, cinema, maritime imagery, and photography. These are set against both observed and reimagined landscapes of his youth in regional New South Wales, as well as scenes of everyday and urban life, rural infastructure and industrial sites.

Since 2017, following the production of his third film, Alice Eats Breakfast, Inchbold began to move away from conventional ideas of memory, autobiography, objectivity and narrative in art. Viewing these as unstable and increasingly akin to fiction, his painting and drawing have shifted toward an engagement with experience as image and myth rather than story — unfixed, resistant to singular interpretation, and capable of accruing new meaning over time.

His work has previously spanned both representational and abstract painting, including portraits, self-portraits, figures, landscapes, interiors, birds, and dark, abstract works produced with enamel sign paint in Tanzania, East Africa, where he resided for a period. More recently, he has become known for densely worked abstract oil paintings, built up through sustained revision and material intensity.

His work is held in collections in Australia and overseas.