Jonathan Zawada | |
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Born | 1981 (age 43–44) Perth, Western Australia, Australia |
Nationality | Australian |
Occupation(s) | multidisciplinary artist, designer, music-video director |
Years active | about 2000–present |
Notable work | Apocalypso cover art; Skin cover art; Metamathemagical Opera House projection; Tall Tales artwork and videos |
Awards | ARIA Award for Best Cover Art (2008, 2016) |
Website | zawada |
Jonathan Zawada (born 1981) is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, designer and music-video director whose work spans painting, digital image-making, installation and product design. [1] [2] He gained prominence creating record-sleeve artwork, winning ARIA Awards for The Presets' Apocalypso and Flume's Skin , and has exhibited internationally. Zawada designed the 2018 Metamathemagical projection for the Sydney Opera House sails [3] and created the CGI/AI artwork and videos for Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke's album Tall Tales (2025). [4]
Zawada was born in Perth, Western Australia, and is largely self-taught. [5] [6] He began professional graphic-design work in Sydney in the early 2000s. His first solo shows –Semantic Webs (2005) and Boolean Values (2008) at Monster Children Gallery – reportedly sold out and later toured to Melbourne. [7] In late 2010 he relocated to Los Angeles and staged Over Time at Prism Gallery – a series of digital landscapes from manipulated graph data painted on linen. [8]
Zawada created the floral cover and full visual campaign for Flume's ' Skin , winning the 2016 ARIA Award for Best Cover Art. [9] The partnership continued with pop-up exhibitions in Los Angeles and Sydney and, in 2024, the immersive installation Every dull moment (EDM) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. [10]
Zawada has collaborated with Mark Pritchard on MP Productions EP 1, [11] and along with Thom Yorke on Tall Tales (2025). For Tall Tales, Zawada designed the artwork and videos, a feature film version of which was screened on 8 May 2025 – the day before the album's release. [11] [12]
Zawada created animated visualisers for Röyksopp's Profound Mysteries trilogy.
Writers note Zawada's blending of analog and digital, artificial and natural. [2] [13] [14] Stephen Todd, wrote in the Australian Financial Review that he sees the world as a "metamathemagical place where science and sensuality, the rational and the emotional, collide." [1]
For Pritchard and Yorke's multimedia project Tall Tales, Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork called Zawada the duo's "informal third member". [4] Fermín Cimadevilla at motion design website Motionographer wrote that the accompanying feature‑length film "evokes a distinct atmosphere – dreamlike yet disorienting" and stated that it defies cliche and AI art trends. [2]
Design press have likewise commended his album packaging. Megan Williams, writing in Creative Review, described the AI‑assisted sleeve for Pritchard's MP Productions EP 1 as "distorted and deformed to surreal effect" and "a bizarre collage of incongruous shapes and textures", adding that it "casts a wry glance at the very technologies that created it." [15]
Year | Title | Venue | City | Notes / refs |
---|---|---|---|---|
2005 | Semantic Webs | Monster Children Gallery | Sydney | First solo show. [7] |
2008 | Boolean Values | Monster Children Gallery | Sydney / Melbourne | Catalogue also self-published. [7] |
2010–11 | Over Time | Prism Gallery | Los Angeles | Data-driven landscapes. [8] |
2014 | Touchingly Unfeeling | Calm & Punk Gallery | Tokyo | Solo exhibition. [18] |
2022 | On Burning Mirrors | Calm & Punk Gallery | Tokyo | Machine-learning image generation. [19] |
2016 | Flume × Jonathan Zawada Pop-Up | Space 15Twenty | Los Angeles | Exhibition of Skin visuals. [14] |
2018 | Metamathemagical – Lighting of the Sails | Sydney Opera House | Sydney | 15-minute projection mapped to Opera House sails. [3] |
2023–24 | DXP² – Digital Transformation Planet | 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art | Kanazawa, Japan | Included "Sacrifice, An Act of Permanence". [20] |
2024 | Every dull moment (EDM) | Art Gallery of New South Wales (Tank) | Sydney | Immersive installation with Flume. [10] |