About Brigitte

Brigitte Gerges Contemporary Cartography
About the Artist

Art That Maps
Your Story.

Brigitte Gerges is a Lebanese-Australian contemporary artist based in Sydney, creating abstract paintings embedded with real GPS coordinates, heritage maps, and aerial photography captured from plane windows at 30,000 feet.
Brigitte Gerges - Lebanese-Australian Artist Sydney

My name is Brigitte Gerges. I'm a Lebanese-Australian contemporary artist working from my studio in Sydney.

I create what I call Contemporary Cartography of the Diaspora - softly blended textured acrylic paintings that embed GPS coordinates, heritage maps, and aerial photography into their foundational layers.

On the surface, my work looks abstract. Soft brushstrokes, rich texture, warm earths and golds. But underneath every painting is a real map. A real place. A real story.

I paint for people who carry more than one country in their chest. People who refuse to choose between where they came from and where they are now. My paintings create a third space - where all of it belongs.

It started with a Turkish rug.

In 1989, my grandmother held a Turkish rug above a car roof while bullets rained down on the road out of Lebanon. She was protecting the children underneath. My family was fleeing to Australia.

They arrived in Western Sydney with nothing except each other. They built a life from the ground up - a new language, a new culture, a new home.

"I grew up between two countries. The one under my feet and the one in every story at the dinner table. I learned early that belonging isn't about where you are. It's about what you carry."

That's the root of everything I make. I embed real GPS coordinates, real aerial photography, and real heritage maps of real places into layers of textured acrylic. The map disappears beneath the paint. The story stays.

My grandmother couldn't take Lebanon with her when she left. But I can paint it onto a canvas and hang it on the wall. And now, so can you.

From urgency to stillness.

In January 2026, I became a mother. And everything shifted.

The maps I'd been painting for years - of displacement, of searching, of the places my family left behind - suddenly had a new destination. Motherhood brought everything into focus.

"The Maps are displacement, escape, the coordinates of survival. The Milk is what comes after: motherhood, sanctuary, and the humbling realisation that this story is not unique."

That commonality is what gives it power. I want to be a voice for mothers who don't know how to express what they are carrying, particularly those navigating postpartum depression and anxiety in silence.

Selected credentials

2023
Florence Biennale XIV
Exhibited the Global Citizens Project under UNESCO patronage. Florence, Italy.
2024
Australian Art Ambassador
Awarded Australia's Art Ambassador at the Art Connects Women event held by Zee Arts Gallery under the patronage of UNESCO, Dubai.
2024
Art Battle Sydney
Competed in Australia's premier live painting competition. Sydney.
2026
Portrait Artist of the Year
Interviewed by producers for Portrait Artist of the Year on ABC.
2023
Studio Panicale Residency
Artist residency in Tuscany, Italy. A transformative period that shaped the direction of my current practice.
2012-2025
Exhibited Across the Globe
Bankstown Art Centre, Verge Gallery Sydney, Mop Gallery, Concord Gallery, Los Angeles, Zee Arts Gallery Dubai, Holy Art Gallery Tokyo, and the Contemporary Drawing Biennale Melbourne.
2015-2026
Internationally Collected
Collectors across Australia, Austria, LA, and beyond.
Education
Academic Background
Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), Sydney College of the Arts. Master of Teaching. Degrees in Ancient History and Art History/Theory. Taught Visual Arts, Photography, Digital Media, and Modern History.

Ongoing series

Maps to Milk
The arc from urgency to stillness, from displacement to sanctuary. Aerial photographs personally captured from 30,000 feet, embedded into layers of textured acrylic with topographic line work. The flagship series.
All originals nationally and internationally collected.
Anatomy Street
The body mapped like geography. Organs drawn as terrain, neural pathways as street plans, breath as coastline. Copic marker studies that treat the human body as a country with its own coordinates, borders, and untold histories.
Frequency
Vibrations that connect people to place, translated from aerial views into abstract colour and movement. This series explores the invisible rhythms between where you are and where you're from - colour as frequency, painting as signal.
All originals nationally and internationally collected.
Global Citizens
Portraits of people who carry more than one country in their chest. Third-space identities painted between cultures, between languages, between the person the world sees and the one that exists underneath. Exhibited at the Florence Biennale 2023.

Your place. Your coordinates.
Your painting.

I take a limited number of bespoke painting commissions each season. If you carry a place inside you that deserves to be on a wall, I'd love to hear about it.