Lesley Wengembo is a 25 year old artist hailed as Papua New Guinea's finest portrait artist and is currently based in Cairns.Lesley completed his Bachelor of Fine art at the prestigious National Art School in 2021. He competed three times in the Archibald Prize and was a finalist in the prestigious Brisbane Portrait Prize in 2020.

 Lesley was raised in the high-crime Port Moresby suburb of Morata – which houses one of the city’s largest squatter settlements. Lesley guesses that  this was what had led him to find art. He found it fascinating, the only thing he could do to escape his reality.

Lesley believes in the way of simplicity - that is to understand the cultural values of every ethnicity. He believes his mission as a contemporary indigenous artist, should be to try and capture an essence of what is still alive today - that which is expressed on their faces, before it dies out. In recent years his work has focussed on hyper-realistic portraiture, mainly capturing indigenous faces dressed up in their traditional attire.

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