BETWEEN US

Logan Moffat is a portrait painter and the 2018 winner of the Adam Portraiture Award. He graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a BFA (Honours) in 2018. Since Year 12, his practice has centred on portraiture, beginning with paintings of people experiencing homelessness on the streets of Auckland. These early encounters shaped his interest in portraying individuals who are often unseen or overlooked, and sparked an ongoing curiosity about the emotional and social impact a portrait can have. One of these early works, Cookie, was later selected as a finalist in the Adam Portraiture Award.

Following art school, Moffat worked as a full-time artist and art tutor for six years, exhibiting nationally in both group and solo exhibitions. His 2018 painting Elam, a depiction of his university peers working together in the studio, was awarded the Adam Portraiture Award. In 2019 he travelled to China for an artist residency, collaborating and exhibiting with local artists in Xi’an, Chengdu, and Beijing. This experience marked a shift in his work toward larger-scale paintings and the introduction of a signature red underpainting that emerges through the surface of his portraits, reflecting both the energy of the subject and the unseen processes of painting.

In 2022, Moffat returned to university to complete a Secondary Teaching Diploma. He is now in his third year teaching Painting, Photography and Design at Pukekohe High School, the town where he lives with his partner, Sarah. Most evenings he can be found back in the studio continuing his painting practice.

Recently, Moffat’s work has focused on the studio itself and the artist’s relationship to that space. For him, the studio is a living environment, an extension of the artist and a place rarely seen by an audience. Through his paintings, he aims to reveal more of the process behind the work, offering glimpses of the imperfections, layers, and decisions that exist before a finished piece arrives on a gallery wall. In 2025 his painting The Garage was awarded second place in the The Academy Prize for Visual Art, and his work Fractured was selected as a finalist in the National Contemporary Art Award at Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery.