Peter Stichbury

Peter Stichbury was born in 1969 in Auckland, New Zealand, and lives and works there today. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 1997, the same year he won New Zealand's Wallace Art Award. He undertook further postgraduate study at Elam in 1999 on a Masters or Honours scholarship, though the dossier does not clearly confirm whether this resulted in a completed graduate degree.

Stichbury's paintings are built from a stylized, graphic flatness and an almost forensic attention to detail, applied most often to portrait subjects: contemporary media figures, self-described alien abductees and contactees, and other faces drawn from UFO and paranormal source material. Early in his career he showed with Starkwhite in Auckland and, in New York, with Tracy Williams, Ltd. His practice has since been shown by Michael Lett in Auckland, Fine Arts Sydney, Gallery Baton in Seoul, and Mother's Tankstation in Dublin and London, with solo exhibitions extending through 2025.

It is worth noting for the record that a different, unrelated New Zealander also named Peter Stichbury, a studio potter born in 1924, died in 2015. The two share no connection beyond the name, and the painter profiled here has been active and exhibiting continuously through 2025 and 2026.

Stichbury's portraits have been described by New Zealand curator and critic Justin Paton as having a "nearly oppressive flawlessness," a phrase widely repeated in gallery and platform biographies to describe the tension between the paintings' graphic polish and their unsettling subject matter. Gallery and platform sources also state that his work has been reviewed in Artforum, Modern Painters, and Hyperallergic, though no verbatim critical text from those outlets could be independently verified for this profile. The recurring critical thread is his use of an almost clinical realism, applied to subjects associated with alienation, the paranormal, and altered states, to unsettle rather than flatter.

Stichbury's auction market is small and irregular, which is typical for a living artist whose primary sales occur through galleries rather than at auction. Dossier sources point to a 2025 sale of a work titled Savannah as his auction high, reported at 254,677, though the sources disagree on whether the currency and venue were New Zealand dollars at International Art Centre in Auckland or US dollars at Artcurial in Paris, and the exact sale date could not be reconciled. Earlier results are more modest and consistent: Wikipedia records a 2019 sale of NZD 67,270, and Starkwhite has reported a sale of the painting Lily Donaldson for NZD 45,625 against a NZD 28,000 reserve. Taken together, these figures suggest a market that has grown meaningfully off a small base, supported by an active international gallery program across Auckland, Sydney, Seoul, Dublin, and London.

Because Stichbury's auction record is thin and, at its highest point, reported inconsistently across sources, collectors should treat any single headline price with caution until currency, venue, and date can be independently confirmed. His current representation, Michael Lett, Fine Arts Sydney, Gallery Baton, and Mother's Tankstation, is the most reliable route to verifying a specific work, particularly given that there is no catalogue raisonne. Provenance research should also take care to rule out confusion with the unrelated, deceased studio potter of the same name, whose ceramic works occasionally appear in New Zealand decorative-arts auctions under an identical name.