George Byrne is a visual artist who transforms the urban everyday into abstract and dreamlike compositions. His large-scale photographs turn everyday surfaces and landscapes of Los Angeles into pictorial abstractions. The artist’s aesthetic is inspired by the clarity and vividness of modernist painting, while also referencing the New Topographics photographic movement, with a gaze deeply rooted in the urban landscape.
From the beginning, experimentation has been central to his approach. “The very first digital adjustments I made to my pictures were simple compositional things. The images I was taking in LA were becoming increasingly simple and geometric in nature, so the exact division of space became very central to the success/balance of the images.” The real breakthrough came when George began combining parts of different photographs, creating hybrid compositions that flirt with abstraction. “This all may sound insanely simple, but I’m not good with tech at all, I’m still not good with Photoshop, I use it like an 8-year-old! But I think my limitations probably worked in my favor.”
Over the last decade, Byrne began to see his work as a form of digital painting. This transition happened, he says, when he began exhibiting his works on a larger scale.
MashUp: How did this transition from traditional photography to a freer, more experimental approach impact your vision of what it means to “capture” an image?
George: Once you really lean into a photograph being a malleable thing, as opposed to a fixed thing, you are in the realm of digital painting. Or it’s at least a hybrid of photo and painting. It may be based in photography, but the result is not reality; it’s more of an impression.
I was chatting with a pal about this idea recently, with regards to how AI technology is being built into the photo software of the new smartphones. This will mean that the majority of photographs that people take will, to varying degrees, be altered: It’s a cloudy day? I’ll make it a sunny day. The table was brown? I’ll make it red. I was frowning? Now I’m smiling. On and on. All this stuff will get easier and easier, and more common and more accepted.
This means that soon the idea of true, pure photography will become a very niche thing. Like vinyl is to streaming music. Obviously, photojournalism will always require pure photography for it to serve its purpose, and some artists and various people will still be purists, but the majority of people using photography will be altering it more and more.
The point I was making was that it’s almost like we’ll be going full circle with photography, in the sense that it’s tuning into a tool that people use to create impressions of things, like painting was before photography was invented.
MashUp: You, who work with a hybrid combination and use analog photography, have you ever felt frustration with the process, like the limitations of film?
George: It can be a pain to deal with, but I started out in photography using film, so it’s what I’m most comfortable with. I also think it still looks better for the type of photography that I’m passionate about. Film is not just about the result; it’s about the process. Its limitations are what make you work and think differently. If I know I have 10 frames to work with, I’m going to engage with a subject in a different way than if I have a digital camera with 1200 frames. I’m not suggesting the results are better or worse, but the experience is very distinct and suits some people, depending on what type of work they are doing.
This hybrid approach also reflects in his latest series, Synthetica. Launched in 2024, the series explores this fusion between analog and digital techniques, resulting in hyper-real, poetic landscapes.
“The Synthetica series I released in 2024 was the most recent installment in the evolution of my work. When I started out taking pictures of LA in the early 2010s, I was approaching it in a more traditional style. I was shooting in the vein of the New Topographics, i.e., raw, untouched, color film photographs of urban spaces. The prints I made were small. In the years that followed, I moved my work into a very different context. I began to incorporate various forms of manipulation and collage to create hyperreal, painterly dreamscapes that were designed for exhibition as large-scale prints. Synthetica is the most recent incarnation of this.”
Byrne reveals that his interest in abstraction comes from the ability to create compositions that hit the viewer instinctively. “Abstraction has a magical quality that’s difficult to intellectualize. It hits you like a good piece of music; there is something very elemental about that” he states.
MashUp: You said your work seeks to transcend direct representation or a linear narrative. Can you explain how you translate spiritual principles into visual form?
George: My work plays off the idea of misrepresenting the most benign urban details. I use the built environment to construct hyper-real dreamscapes. There is obviously manipulation, but the seams or cut lines are invisible, on purpose. Because I combine myriad perspectives into a single image, trying to understand the pictures can be difficult. I believe this impulse of trying to decode or rationalize the images is part of the reason they work. This makes the experience of looking at the images active, rather than passive; there is an exchange going on.
So, on the one hand, I’m celebrating the beauty in the everyday, but I’m also baking in an illusion of simplicity and harmony. Many hundreds of hours of detailed work and consideration go into the making of the images to make them look and feel the way they do. I see this process as inherently spiritual, in the sense that it reflects the way we experience reality—not as a single, fixed perspective, but as an ongoing interplay of perception, memory, and illusion. My work looks to encourage a state of awareness beyond the surface, inviting the viewer to engage in a form of meditation: a quiet wrestling with the image.
While I don’t subscribe to any spiritual belief system, all this stuff, to me, is the essence of transcendence—not escaping reality, but expanding the way we engage with it, making room for the unknown, the imperceptible, and the sublime within the everyday.
His creative process is fluid and instinctive. Often, it starts with low-resolution scans and evolves through meditative collages. Deciding when an image is finished is an ongoing challenge. “Some pictures take a few weeks to realize, and others take years. It’s an inexact science. I’ve also got so much work backed up that I’ve shot over the years, that a part of putting together a new show is not only shooting new images but reevaluating older ones”, he says.
The move from Sydney to Los Angeles was also a milestone in his career. He didn’t go to LA to pursue a music career, but among the faded colors and decaying architecture of the 70s and 80s, the palm trees, and metallic reflections from carports, George found the scenes that would begin shaping his work. “Landing in LA I had a real visual epiphany, hence my impulse to take photos came from a very pure place, I just wanted to record what I was seeing.”
MashUp: Society values early professional success, but you only started gaining recognition after your 30s. Did you ever feel pressure about that, especially financially?
George: I felt a huge amount of pressure in my late 20s to make my mark, which, looking back, seems so ridiculous. I was a full-time musician at that time, and in music, even more so than in the arts, ageism is real. You’re considered over the hill at 35! So yeah, I went through all that. There were periods where I was very down about not having any money while all my friends were having kids, settling down, and finding good jobs, but we all go through these things at our own pace. In my early 30s, moving to LA, I felt a huge relief from the expectations I had on myself. That may have been part of why I was so receptive to the city in the way I was seeing it and feeling it. Even though I was broke, I was exhilarated. I was also around a lot of people my age and older in similar situations. That said, it wasn’t easy; I was often living month to month, working casual jobs, and scraping by. It was stressful at times. But all that experience served me well because by the age of 37/38, when I suddenly had some opportunities with my photography, I was primed to take full advantage of them. I did not fuck around.
Despite the typical challenges of an artist’s life, George humorously admits that having kids pushed him to be more focused, as now there’s another mouth to feed!
The fact is, between urban abstractions and the magic of the everyday, George Byrne redefines the banal and transforms it into visual poetry. His gaze reveals a world that seems invisible to those who rush by but, in his hands, becomes a parallel universe — introspective, fragmented, and timeless.
“One of the greatest compliments I can ever receive is when someone tells me that my pictures have encouraged them to look at the world in a different way, to not take everyday things for granted, and to see that there is beauty all around.”
If he could collaborate with any artist: Willem De Kooning, he is just a huge fan.
The strangest thing someone has ever said about your art:There’s no standout crazy comment, but I often get people telling me that an image of mine has a very specific, personal symbolic meaning to them and their life… which is so awesome.
The weirdest advice: I had a person tell me I should print all my images the size of a postage stamp and send them to myself by registered mail for copyright purposes. His heart was in the right place, but it didn’t influence me in any way. Haha!
