Sydney-based Charles Billich is one of the most prominent living Australian painters.

His works hang in some of the worlds best venues and he has been an honoured guest and resident artist on many occasions. From the Vatican Museum to the White House, the olympic Museum in Lausanne to his Majesty king George V Tupou Palace in Tonga, the Red Cross Museum in Geneva and numerus university, government, corporate and private collections, Charles Billich has an eclectic and ubiquitous following. Charles Billich’s art has been shaped by personal ecperience. As a teenager Charles was a student dancer with the opera corp de vallet in Rijeka, where he went to college. He also wrote satirical articles for a local magazine and for doing so was sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Yugoslav state. An amnesty two year saw him unexpectedly released, and he at once sought political asylum in Austria where he went on to study art at the Volkschocheschule in Salzburg. Migrating to Austria in 1956 he studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Tehnology and the National Gallery School of Victoria. An attempt to put this European-Australian artist and draughtsman into historic and thematic perspective qickly shows him to be an innovator as well as a maverick: dedicated to excellence, difficult to categorize and yet accessible to all. Whatever the medium or the vision, Charles Billich creates works of distinction that are enjoyed around the world.