Australia's Top-Selling Living Artists
The 20 names that collectors have backed most strongly at auction
Auction rankings tend to tell a conservative story. They often reward artists whose reputations are already familiar to collectors and whose best works are instantly recognisable. That is especially true in Australia, where the auction room is still heavily shaped by established twentieth-century names like Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams, and Arthur Boyd.
This week I take a narrower approach and analyse living Australian artists to see where collector’s money has actually gone at auction this decade.1 There are 21 names that need to be passed by before we reach our top placed living artist, Tim Storrier. And there are over 140 artists that need to be filtered out to get our list of top 20 living artists.
The ranking is insightful, but also imperfect. It favours established artists (and that generally means older artists) with enough secondary-market supply to see multiple works sell at auction. Even so, it gives a useful snapshot of where demand has been strongest, and reveals glimpses of younger artists that may be the future blue chips of the Australian market.
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#20 - #11 Ranking
Before the top 10, it is worth pausing on the artists ranked 20 to 11. It shows how broad the Australian market has become.
There are major First Nations artists, including Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Angelina Pwerle, Michael Cook and Reko Rennie. There are artists associated with photography, most obviously Tracey Moffatt. There are also senior painters such as Imants Tillers, Dale Frank and Michael Johnson, whose careers sit within the late postwar generation that reshaped Australian art after modernism. CJ Hendry and Michael Zavros add another strand again: highly visible contemporary artists whose markets have developed in a different era, closer to social media, brand recognition and global collector networks.
Now, let’s look at the top 10 in more detail.
#10 Tim Maguire
Born: 1958 | Sales Value $891,410 | Highest Price: $122,727 | Lots Sold: 22 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 1
Tim Maguire is one of the more international figures on this list with his career being built between Australia and Europe. His work sits between painting and photography with highly polished, large-scale, works often featuring extreme close-ups of floral arrangements.
#9 Rick Amor
Born: 1948 | Sales Value $1,245,385 | Highest Price: $429,545 | Lots Sold: 44 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 1
Rick Amor’s standing has been built slowly and steadily, which is often how serious reputations in Australian art are made. He belongs to the strong Melbourne tradition of painters for whom atmosphere, place, and draughtsmanship carry significant weight. A significant new record was achieved in 2025 with his work, The Waiter, selling well beyond it’s estimate of $200-$250k, helping to establish his position as one of the leading senior artists in Australia and giving a notable boost to the total sales value over the decade.
#8 Peter Booth
Born: 1940 | Sales Value $1,339,022 | Highest Price: $171,818 | Lots Sold: 38 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 3
Peter Booth was born in Sheffield, UK before emigrating to Australia in 1958. He is one of Australia’s major postwar painters, known for dark, intense works that move between abstraction, figuration and apocalyptic imagery. His paintings often feel psychologically charged, with landscapes and figures carrying a sense of threat, mystery and emotional force.
#7 Criss Canning
Born: 1947 | Sales Value $1,780,074 | Highest Price: $412,500 | Lots Sold: 27 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 4
Criss Canning is one of the clearest signs of a market reassessing an artist’s relevance. She has had a long and serious career, but recent results suggest collectors are now putting more weight behind that achievement, particularly with a record setting $412,500 sale last year. Canning is best known for richly coloured still lifes and interiors, often filled with flowers, ceramics, textiles and domestic objects, some of my favourite being those depicting coffee sets.
#6 Yvonne Audette
Born: 1930 | Sales Value $2,603,673 | Highest Price: $294,545 | Lots Sold: 30 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 9
Yvonne Audette is a key figure in Australian abstraction, with a career shaped by her time in New York and Europe where she was influenced by painters such as Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. Her paintings are layered and carefully balanced, often using gesture, structure and colour to create a quiet but complex visual language. Nine works selling above $100,000 is not a fluke. It suggests depth, not just a single headline result, and that collectors are catching up with an artist whose importance has long been recognised by institutions.
#5 John Kelly
Born: 1965 | Sales Value $2,620,702 | Highest Price: $355,909 | Lots Sold: 46 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 6
John Kelly has one of the most distinctive entry points for collectors. His reworking of William Dobell’s camouflage cows (these were papier mache cows made during WWII to deceive Japanese fighter pilots) gives the market an image it can quickly recognise, but the appeal goes beyond a clever motif. Kelly’s work turns back on Australian art itself, playing with national myth, war, absurdity and art history. That combination of recognisability and intellectual bite has given his market real strength demonstrated by six works selling above $100,000.
#4 Garry Shead
Born: 1942 | Sales Value $3,340,291 | Highest Price: $319,091 | Lots Sold: 58 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 8
Garry Shead has long occupied a central place in the narrative and figurative side of Australian art. His paintings draw on myth, symbolism, Australian landscape, and creating images that sit somewhere between memory, story and allegory. His career has moved across painting, printmaking and film, giving him a wider cultural footprint than auction figures alone can capture. Though with 8 works selling above $100,000, the market has certainly bought into his interpretations of history.
#3 Ben Quilty
Born: 1973 | Sales Value $3,464,614 | Highest Price: $270,000 | Lots Sold: 52 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 10
Ben Quilty and Del Kathryn Barton (next at #2) are the youngest artists in the top 10 but have already secured their place in Australian’s art history. Quilty first became widely visible through the Brett Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship that he won in 2002 and then gained further exposure by winning the Archibald Prize in 2011. He helped reconnect contemporary painting with questions of masculinity, national identity, war and colonial violence, which gives him a place in Australian art history well beyond the auction room. He is one of those artists whose market strength reflects genuine cultural visibility. Ten works above $100,000 suggests collectors are not just responding to visibility, but to sustained confidence in his place within contemporary Australian painting.
#2 Del Kathryn Barton
Born: 1972 | Sales Value $5,852,174 | Highest Price: $527,727 | Lots Sold: 52 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 19
Del Kathryn Barton’s market has both recognisability and depth, which is a powerful combination. Her work is instantly recognisable for its intricate detail, heightened colour and fantastical figures. Her paintings often explore femininity, motherhood, and transformation through dense symbolic worlds of flowers, animals, bodies and pattern. What’s notable is not just the total sales, but that 19 works sold above $100,000. That points to a broad collector base willing to compete repeatedly, not merely for one exceptional result. Her two Archibald wins helped cement her public reputation, but the auction market now appears to be lifting her higher as one of the defining Australian painters of the twenty-first century.
#1 Tim Storrier
Born: 1949 | Sales Value $5,889,646 | Highest Price: $270,000 | Lots Sold: 99 | Works sold in excess of $100k: 26
Tim Storrier takes the top spot through consistency rather than one runaway sale. He emerged in the late 1960s, won the Sulman Prize at just nineteen, and has remained a serious name in Australian art for more than half a century. His auction record is lower than Del Kathryn Barton’s, but he has produced more six-figure results and sold roughly twice as many works at auction than anyone else on the list. Like many leading artists, his works are instantly recognisable and he best known for symbolic landscapes shaped by fire, night skies and the vastness of the Australian interior.
Final Thoughts
There are few shocks at the top of this list. Most of these artists are senior figures with long careers and established reputations, including the top 4 all winning the Archibald Prize. That makes sense. Auction markets usually reward certainty, and certainty takes time.
What is more interesting is the range beneath that certainty. The broader list includes postwar abstraction, contemporary figurative painting, First Nations art, photography, conceptual practice, and artists whose reputations have been shaped as much by prizes, institutions and biennales as by the auction room itself.
It also shows that the living Australian market is not driven by one kind of artist. Some names are here because collectors repeatedly pay six figures for major works. Others are here because their imagery is instantly recognisable. Some benefit from reassessment. Others from long-term consistency. Put together, the list is less a final verdict than a market map: a way of seeing which parts of Australian art collectors are still actively backing.
Sales results are between 2020 - 2025 and from the auction houses Menzies, Deustcher and Hackett, Smith & Singer, Leonard Joel, Bonhams, and Art Leven