Brad Buckley (born 1952, Sydney) is an Australian artist, activist, urbanist and was a Professorial Fellow at Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, the University of Melbourne (2017–2024). He was also a foundation research fellow at the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at the University of Melbourne. Buckley was previously, Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. He has exhibited widely, with exhibitions across Australia, and globally in the United States, Germany, Canada, Poland, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Israel, and Norway.
Known for his polemical writings, he has also published extensively on contemporary art, art schools, curating and the neo-liberal influence on society.
Buckley's writings have been published by Pluto Press Australia, NSCAD Press (Canada), Libri Publishing (UK), Bandicoot Publishing (Australia), Sydney University Press (Australia), Power Publications, (Australia), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (New York), Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies (New York), The Pennsylvania State University Press (US) and Wiley-Blackwell (US).
He is a regularly contributor to journals, such as, Broadsheet: Contemporary Art + Culture and Artist Profile. Many of these articles and publications were co-written or co-edited with his late friend and colleague John Conomos (1947–2024).
Background Buckley is a sixth-generation Australian, predominately of Irish and Celtic heritage and his immediate ancestors are a mix of lawyers and artisans. His paternal family are mainly from County Cork, which was a stronghold of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921). This area of Ireland, particularly West Cork, still has a high percentage of people who speak Gaeltacht (Irish Gaelic). Buckley has spoken about his strong affinity with his Gaelic and Celtic ancestry and how this has influenced his sense of social justice.
He spent his childhood years in the eastern suburbs of Sydney before travelling and living in Europe and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. His father, Jim Buckley, owned the Newcastle Hotel in Lower George Street, Sydney.National Library of Australia catalogue The Newcastle was one of the Sydney Push 'hotels' – the Push members were bohemian, anti-authoritarian, anarchist – and The Newcastle was frequented by artists, poets, writers, journalists, underworld figures and philosophers between 1956 and 1972.
He was educated at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, (now Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London), and the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design,‘’Scanlines’’, biography page, College of Fine Arts (UNSW), dLux Media and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1982. Buckley returned to live in New York (1990–1992) as a Creative Australia (formally the Australia Council of the Arts) fellow at MoMA/PS1.
Buckley has been an active leader in the broader art world; as co-chair of the Artspace Visual Arts Centre Board (1985–88), he worked with Professor Su Baker AM and director Sally Couacaud to negotiate a permanent home for Artspace at the Gunnery in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. As chair (2001–06), he worked with executive director Nicholas Tsoutas to negotiate an increase in Artspace’s funding from $300,000 to $1,000,000 per year, as part of the Commonwealth government’s Visual Arts and Craft Strategy (VACS).Artspace Visual Arts Centre history.
Works While living in London, Buckley saw several plays by Samuel Beckett performed by Beckett's preferred leading actor, Billy Whitelaw, which had a profound influence on his thinking about art and the role it plays in the world.
Buckley's works operate within an overarching schema entitled The Slaughterhouse Project, which is an aesthetic armature, a strategy used for aesthetic infiltration, or infection. As the name implies, the Project is a conceptual device of cauterisation, a way of exploring taboos, for investigating political anomalies, for venting dissatisfaction with social injustice.'The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that's Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited)', Australian Centre for Photography, 2 March–19 May 2013. Operating at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, the work investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility. Buckley's work has been included in: the 3rd International Biennial (Ljubljana, Slovenia),InDepth Art News. the 4th Construction in Process 1993 (the Artists' Museum, Lodz, Poland),Construction in Process IV 1993, Lodz, Poland.Sureck, Suzy (guest ed.), 'Construction in Process', New Observations special double issue, no. 102, 1994.Volk, Gregory, 'My Home is Your Home, Construction in Process', Art + Text, no.47, 1994. the 5th Construction in Process 1995 (the Artists' Museum, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel),Construction in Process V 1995, Mizpeh Ramon, Israel. the 9th Biennale of Sydney, Australia,Bond, Anthony, Artistic Director, Foreword, The 9th Biennale of Sydney, The Boundary RiderJackson, Mark, 'Vigilance' in The Boundary Rider: The 9th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 1990, pp.320–328) and The Deconsumptionists, Art as Archive, 2014 (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, US).Project Anywhere, The Deconsumptionists.
His work has been exhibited at: Franklin Furnace Archive (New York),Franklin Furnace Archive, Goings On Artspace (Auckland),WorldCat, ‘The Slaughterhouse Project: The part which is silent and moves with great slowness’, Artspace Auckland, 1996Broadfoot, Keith, 'The End of the Line: Installation Art Today’, catalogue essay for The Slaughterhouse Project: The part which is silent and moves with great slowness, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand, 1996, unpaginated. the Art Gallery of New South Wales,Morris, Bob, ‘Recollection Is An Elemental Phenomenon’, catalogue essay, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney and Australian Perspecta '85, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1985, p.24. the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (US), The Visual Arts Gallery (University of Alabama at Birmingham),Levine, Brett, 'Princes Kept the View' catalogue essay for The Slaughterhouse Project: The Light on the Hill, Visual Arts Gallery, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA (2002) in Brad Buckley, John Conomos, Australian Centre for Photography, 2013, pp.51–59) La Chambre Blanche (Quebec),Millner, Jacqueline, 'The Slaughterhouse Project', catalogue essay for The Slaughterhouse Project: In Medias Res, La Chambre Blanche, Quebec, in Le Bulletin 26, 2006. Artspace Visual Arts Centre (Sydney),Conomos, John, ‘Brad Buckley, Etiquette: Space, Site, Politics’, catalogue essay for Unthinkable: Etiquette and Unthinkable: Fear of Joy, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney, 2004.Broadfoot, Keith, ‘Site Unseen’, catalogue essay for Those Unspoken Tragedies (and that slashed eye), Artspace, Sydney, 1995. MoMA/PS 1 (New York),Kismaric, Carole (ed.), National and International Studio Programs 1990–1991, Institute for Contemporary Art, PS 1 Museum, New York, 1991. Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane),Jackson, Mark, ‘ipseity/ravissement’, catalogue essay, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1992, unpaginated. Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN) (Sydney), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax, Canada),Wyman, Jessica, 'What We Do With Walls', catalogue essay for Giving Notice: Words on Walls, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada, 2010, pp.35–42) Tsukuba Art Gallery (Japan), Plato’s Cave (New York), Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), Reflex Wall Painting Project (Toowoomba, Australia).Kyle Jenkins and Tarn McLean, PAINTINGONTOPOFITSELF 2015-2020: Five Shows about Contemporary Painting, Loophole Press, Toowoomba, Australia, 2020, Kandos Projects (Kandos, Australia), Macquarie University Art Gallery, Macquarie University (Australia), and Yilan Museum of Art (Yilan, Taiwan).
His work has been cited in New Observations,‘Konstrukcja w Procesie-Construction in Process’, New Observations 102, July/August/September/October 1994 (New York) Art + Text (Sydney), Flash Art (Milan), Artforum International, and Art in America.Melissa Kuntz, Goodness, Truth, and Money, Art in America, September, 2018, Volume 106, Issue 8, 57-59.
Two catalogues have been published on his work.
Brad Buckley, Brett Levine (ed.), essay by Brett Levine and an interview by Nicholas Tsoutas, Artspace Visual Arts Centre (2011).Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia. (2001) ISBN 1 876017 724. Brad Buckley and John Conomos Monograph, (Buckley and Conomos eds.), essays by Brett Levine, ‘Princes Kept the View’ and Edward Colless ‘Abecedarium’, and Biljana Jancic and Alex Gawronski ‘Interview’, Australian Centre for Photography, (2013).https://web.archive.org/web/20130503043817/http://tmp.acp.org.au/current/autumn-season/index.php?obj_id=buckley
Curatorial work Buckley has a longstanding interest in curating and has undertaken projects at the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.Buckley, Brad, 'Provocative and Problematic Video from the American East Coast', catalogue essay, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 1983.‘Provocative and problematic video from the American east coast’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1983‘Exhibitions of note’, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania At Sydney’s Artspace Visual Arts Centre in 1997, he curated (with Nicholas Tsoutas) an exhibition of the seminal American conceptual artist Lawrence Wiener. The exhibition included four satellite installations by younger artists: Mark Brown, Adam Cullen, Susan Johnston and Katharina Struber. He also co-curated with Blair French Reading and Writing Rooms, which was a major 30-year survey of New Zealand-born, Canada-based artist Bruce Barber,Bruce Barber website. and was held in 2008 at Artspace.Reading and Writing Rooms, 2008 The project was developed in conjunction with Manukau Institute of Technology and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland, where a partner component of the exhibition opened in December of the same year.
In 2018, he co-curated with Helen Hyatt-Johnston,The Twilight Girls, Cementa. Couplings, at the Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, Australia.Couplings, Dominik Mersch Gallery, April 2018. This exhibition considered the cognitive and emotional lives that operates between artist couples, whether conscious or unconscious and how this dialogue influences their work.
Buckley’s two most recent curatorial projects in 2025 are Ken Unsworth: Love is the Sweetest Thing at Macquarie University Art Gallery, Macquarie University in Sydney. This exhibition consisted of five new installations, two of which were positioned as you entered the gallery, while the other three were ‘housed’ in the purpose-built rooms. Buckley has said of Unsworth, “Unlike many Australian artists who at the end of their working lives seem to become tone deaf to their own failings, Unsworth, now in his nineties, is producing new works that are the most insightful, emotionally compelling and magically irrational of his career.” “Ken Unsworth: The Maestro in His Nineties”, Brad Buckley, Ken Unsworth: Love is the Sweetest Thing, Brad Buckley (ed.), Macquarie University Art Gallery and Bandicoot Publishing, Sydney, Australia. p38. 2025.
In September of the same year, he curated a major retrospective exhibition Royston Harpur: A Painter’s Painter (co-curated with Noel Thurgate, Lizzy Galloway and Helen Hyatt-Johnston) at Mudgee Arts Precinct, Mudgee, Australia. The aim of this retrospective was to affirm Harpur’s place within the lineage of Australian post–World War II abstract painting.