Artist Bio

Lauren Bzowy (she/her) is an emerging South Australian artist working primarily with painting and drawing. She completed her Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual Art) at Flinders University and Adelaide College of the Arts (TAFE SA) in 2021.

In March and April of 2026, Lauren was assistant curator alongside curator and her good friend, Shani Engelbrecht, as they put together their own group exhibition titled RELICS. This show features work by alumni from their graduating class of 2021 and was featured as part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival.

Lauren’s work was selected for the Helpmann Academy 2022 Graduate Exhibition and, more recently, she has participated in group exhibitions for Newmarch Gallery, Carclew, SALA and the Barossa Regional Gallery. Lauren’s work was selected for the Light Electorate Winner in the Gawler Art Prize 2022. She continues to develop her style to express her love for using symbols, painting and drawing as a vehicle for story-telling.

Artist Statement

Deviating from the swirling, unstable oil portraits of her art school days, Lauren’s work has shifted towards narration through symbolism and metaphor. By using a combination of intense, contrasting colours and familiar motifs, Lauren tells stories of both past and present experiences. Her rigid grid-like compositions are disturbed as the tangled, twisting tendrils and tails of flora and fauna braid themselves into dreamlike worlds of organised chaos. She may include direct references to “shooting yourself in the foot” in the form of a hydra cutting its own head off, resulting in it growing more heads and, consequently, giving itself more “problems”. Or, like in many of her works, Lauren may embed recurring symbols that reference something personal. While many of her paintings and drawings represent her ideas around metaphors relating to self-sabotage, themes of memory, grief, loss, and nostalgia remain core components in her work.