Rick Amor

Richard William Amor, known professionally as Rick Amor, was born on 3 March 1948 in Frankston, Victoria, Australia. He completed a Certificate of Art at the Caulfield Institute of Art in 1965, then studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1966 to 1968, where he earned an Associate Diploma of Painting under John Brack, graduating with the drawing prize and a travelling scholarship.

Amor built his early career through Australia Council grants and residencies, including a Visual Arts Board grant in 1975 and studio residencies in Barcelona (1991), New York's Green Street Studio (1995), and London (2000). In 1999, the Australian War Memorial appointed him official war artist to East Timor, the first such appointment since the Vietnam War, and resulting works entered the Memorial's collection. His practice spans painting, printmaking, and sculpture, most notably the sculpture Relic, which won the McClelland Sculpture Award in 2007. He has exhibited annually at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne since 1983 and is also represented by Philip Bacon Galleries in Queensland. He lives and works in Melbourne.

Rick Amor's critical standing rests less on a single defining review than on sustained institutional recognition. He has been represented continuously by Niagara Galleries since 1983 and by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane, has held a retrospective at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, and was the subject of a dedicated National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Rick Amor: 21 Portraits, in 2014 to 2015. His prize record runs from the National Gallery Drawing Prize in 1967 through the McClelland Sculpture Award in 2007 and the Australian Print Workshop's George Collie Memorial Award in 2014, and his 1999 appointment as an official war artist to East Timor by the Australian War Memorial further reflects the institutional regard for his work. Read together, this pattern of gallery loyalty, museum programming, and public collecting points to a durable, consistently supported career rather than one built around a single breakout moment.

Amor's auction market is a specialist, largely domestic Australian one. His all-time auction record is AUD 429,545 for The Waiter (1997), sold at Menzies in Melbourne on 20 August 2025 (a hammer price of AUD 350,000 plus buyer's premium); Menzies' own catalogue records the same lot under a sale date of 25 August 2025, so the exact day should be treated as approximate pending further corroboration. That sale superseded the previous record of AUD 294,545 for Figure in a Landscape, sold at Menzies in June 2019, which itself had superseded AUD 227,045 for The Attic Amphora (The Lamp), sold at Menzies in March 2016. Deutscher and Hackett estimates for individual paintings and works on paper have typically clustered in the AUD 25,000 to 35,000 range, indicating that even the pre-2025 benchmarks sat well above his usual secondary-market band.

Amor's market is thin by international standards, with a small number of results defining the top end and most works trading well under six figures in Australian dollars. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance should be checked against the artist's own online catalogue of works and against his representing galleries, Niagara Galleries and Philip Bacon Galleries, both of which have handled his work for decades. Because the auction record rests on a single standout sale rather than a deep run of comparable results, collectors should treat it as an indicator of ceiling demand rather than a typical price point.