Denise Green was born in Melbourne in 1946, and grew up in Brisbane. In 1964, she left Australia and completed studies at L’École des Beaux-Arts and La Sorbonne, in Paris. In 1969, she moved to New York City, where she attended Hunter College for graduate studies under Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Here, her practice developed within the Western modernist tradition. She also incorporated an Eastern and Aboriginal aesthetic into her work, drawing from her early years in Australia and travels in India. 

In 1978-79, Green participated in two major museum exhibitions, the Guggenheim Museum’s Young American Artists, and the Whitney Museum’s New Image Painting, which launched her into the New York art scene. Green has had more than 140 solo exhibitions, 35 of which were solo museum shows. Since 1999, retrospectives of her work were mounted at nine venues across Australia, the U.S., and Europe, including, among others, P.S.1/MoMA in New York, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany. 

Her works have entered more than 50 public collections, including UQ Art Museum in Brisbane, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Denise Green also writes about art, and has published two books, both co-published by the University of Minnesota Press and Macmillan Art Publishers (Australia). Her 2012 book, Denise Green: An Artist’s Odyssey, is a blend of autobiographical and biographical writings. In her 2005 book, Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, she develops a new approach to art criticism and creativity, inspired by Australian Aboriginal and Indian thought. 

In 2007, Green was awarded the Order of Australia, one of the country’s highest honors.

She is based in New York City.

Currently, Green is preparing a new body of work, much of which is destined for a 2021 museum exhibition at H2 Center for Contemporary Art in Augsburg, Germany.

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