Virginia Cuppaidge grew up in Brisbane, Australia, studied art with John Olsen, Stanlius Rapotec, Marea Gazzard, and Robert Klippel. She moved to live permanently in New York in 1969.
She has had 36 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Australia. Her first New York showing took place in 1973 at the New York Cultural Center when work was chosen for “Women Choose Women.” Her most recent show as in 2014 at “Women Choose Women Again” at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Her first solo exhibition took place at AM Sachs Gallery in 1973 and in 1975 she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Touring exhibitions include “Nature of Painting” in Canada organized by the Canadian Heritage Foundation. Her piece Sky is Everywhere was included in “Seeing Jazz” a three-year traveling exhibition organized by The Smithsonian Institute.
Known as a superb and inventive colorist, her work has been described as “a vivid celebration of nature and the cosmos ... exploring the range of possibilities of an ideal and consummate correspondence between nature and painting,” according to Peter Selz. In Art in America David Ebony wrote, “One could say Australian-born artist Virginia Cuppaidge is a painter’s painter.” Joan Marter, professor at Rutgers University, said, “Virginia Cuppaidge addresses one of the principle tenets of abstraction: the experience of nature is more than the eye can see – the cosmic realms and the microscopic world also can be realized through abstracted images.”
