Theresa Byrnes’s 37 year, multi-disciplinary career as a painter, performance artist, writer and activist etch an emboldened path exploring the impact of action in painting and finding mastery of freedom in its purest state, in the mistake.
In 1990 (at 20) Byrnes was accepted into an Aboriginal community, Yirrkala in remote Arnhem Land, Australia, and her painting and performance work are primarily the exploration of the forces of nature. Eco-feminism powers her vision and results in her recent work being 100% non-toxic.
Byrnes believes that central to all life is decay. Byrnes began using trashed wood fragments to paint on in 2001, her hair as a paint brush in 2008, earth as pigment in 2011, single use plastic bags for mark making in 2019, turmeric as pigment in her 2021performance, GLIMPSE and
Magenta Marking #1 2021 all natural pigments in her 2022 performance, IHaveABody, which inaugurated her current IHaveABody project and documentary, a 2023 Fractured Atlas campaign.
Her performances are a theatrical event that cut to the core of her studio practice. In the studio she makes paintings and in performance she is inside the painting process itself.
Theresa’s performance pieces have been described as 'wondrous,' 'purist,' and 'uncompromising' by London's Daily Mirror. Her performance art was featured at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, 2000 and 2003, as well as in the Queens Council for the Arts Festival of 2012, at New York Live Arts in 2017 and at GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE in 2021.
She received a Young Australian of the Year award in 1999, for heading up the Theresa Byrnes Foundation for scientific research into Friedrich's Ataxia (a disorder of the nervous system which she herself has). Byrnes raised a of a quarter million dollars for FA research through art auctions in 1997 and 1998.
Byrnes has managed her career and life while dealing with progressing disability. She published her autobiography, The Divine Mistake in 1999. she received the Pollock- Krasner grant for painting in 2003, and again in 2006,
In 2017 she founded/curated TACTICAL STREAM, a biannual group exhibition where artists develop their activist voice and work together toward making social change.
Mother to her eight-year-old son, Byrnes paints and performs in Manhattan, while working on her second book, a tumultuous memoir of being an artist in the real world.
Byrnes takes commissions on a limited basis mail@theresabyrnes.com
