Anthony Bartok

Anthony Bartok is a Sydney based painter and print maker whose work is a wryly humorous comment on modern society. Using imagery taken from both online and his own photographic archive, Bartok reduces them to the flat colours and bold lines reminiscent of a children’s colouring book.

“Anthony Bartok is part of a long lineage of artists who have dipped their hand into the incessant stream of ephemeral, media images and appropriated them to a critique of the conditions of our social existence, of how our norms and behaviours are manipulated for base commercial imperatives. I can’t think of anybody working today with drawing, painting and print media who does it better. His selection of source images, guided by a sure feeling for contradiction, exposes the deep strangeness of what the multitude are scrolling through daily. He is one of those rare artists whose work can elicit full-blown laughter, as the profane is set alongside the ridiculous to produce a riotously apt critique of modern life”- Joe Frost, 2023.

He is a 2022 MFA graduate of the National Art School, and has been a finalist in among others: The Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2026), The Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize (2025), The Kedumba Drawing Award (2024), The Waverly Art Prize (2022), Lester Prize for Portraiture (2020), The Kilgour Art Prize (2019) and Winner of the Fisher’s Ghost Award for Drawing, Painting and Printmaking (2016).