By any measure, 2012 was a huge year for Melbourne-born and trained artist Michael Peck. It started with his appointment as a lecturer and tutor at the Australian Academy of Design in the Visual Arts course that has been oversubscribed in 2013. For some the academic work alone would be enough, but Peck had much, much more on his palette.
He was a finalist in two of the country’s most prestigious prizes, the Archibald for the second consecutive year and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, which awarded him a Highly Commended. He concluded a two-year residency on Big hART’s Namatjira play, winning him a Helpmann Award for Best Regional Touring Production. Add to that his work in three group shows, one at the South Australian Museum as part of the Namatjira Project, another at Paradise Hills Gallery called Melbourne’s Burning, and a third at Metro Gallery called Climate Change. He gave talks and interviews, one with Richard Morecroft at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and he was featured in three articles, one of them in the Australian Art Review. All that was missing was a solo show, his last being The Landing at Metro Gallery, but that finished in early December 2011 so it almost counts.