About / Biography

Studio Interview, 2016

Irene Wellm currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. In 2001 she completed a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts. During he thirty-year career she has had numerous solo and group exhibitions across Australia, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Germany. Since 2001 when she won the Emerging Artist award at the Darebin LaTrobe Acquisitive Art Prize, she has been a consistent finalist in a number of art prizes - most recently the 2014 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Internationally she represented Australia as one of three artists in the UBS Art Award 2000, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2012 she was awarded the New Works Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, to do research and a nine month residency in Leipzig, Germany. More recently, a second Leipzig residency in 2014 culminated a third return trip to exhibit there, supported by the Australia Council Visual Arts Travel Fund.

The artist's work is held in the collections of ArtBank, the Ballarat Regional Gallery, the City of Darebin Art Collection, La Trobe University, and Stockwell Downs; and in private collections in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A.