Australian-born Simon Gunning (b. 1956, Sydney) has resided in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood for over 40 years. His appreciation for the local scenery is evident in his renowned, intricately composed oil paintings of the Southern Louisiana landscape. His compositions reflect familiar yet profound scenes: lush swamps inhabited by egrets and ibises, industrial cargo lifts reflecting in placid waters, and the massive ships navigating the winding Mississippi River.
Despite his veneration for his subject matter, Gunning’s work is never sentimentalized. His "edgy" style has been described as an iconic personal statement about life, sorrow, and a deep love affair with an exotic land. He possesses a startling ability to capture scenes at the most felicitous moments, rendering the light and color unique to the Gulf South.
Gunning studied painting and drawing from 1976 to 1978 at the National Gallery School of Art and the Victorian College of Art in Melbourne, Australia. A fixture of the Louisiana art scene since the 1980s, he was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship by the Louisiana Division of the Arts in 1999 and was named the Donna Perret Rosen Artist-in-Residence at Isidore Newman School in 2009.
Gunning has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions. Notable solo shows at the Arthur Roger Gallery include Meet Me by the River (2022), Shipwrecks and the Atchafalaya (2018), and The River and the City (2015), alongside a major retrospective, Simon Gunning and the Southern Louisiana Landscape, at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2016–2017). His work has also been featured in major national and international group exhibitions, including the New Orleans Triennial at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2001) and New Orleans: A Creative Odyssey at the Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. (2000).
His work is held in prominent public collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Percent for Art Collection at Louis Armstrong International Airport. Additionally, his paintings are included in major corporate collections such as Microsoft Corporation, First Bank and Trust Company, Saks Fifth Avenue, Iberia Bank, and Whitney National Bank, as well as private collections internationally.