Current Exhibition: WINTER EXHIBITION: REMARKABLE WOMEN

Tjala Arts, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands, South Australia; 

Private collection, Sydney 

Minyima Tjuta – Many Women. Yaama Ganu Gallery and Tjala Arts, May 2021 

Related works:

Wynne Prize 2021 Finalist Award: Seven Sisters, 2021, acrylic on linen 197 x 197.4 cm 

Kapi Tjukula Tjuta, meaning “many rock holes” is an extraordinary collaborative painting by Naomi Kantjuriny, Mona Mitakiki and Tjimpayi Presley. The rock holes in the composition convey the importance of the land features in collecting water after rain and providing sustenance during the dry seasons. These sites are essential elements in the desert and are highly revered by all Anangu Pitjantjatjara people. Through painting, these Mitakiki women celebrate the rock holes that are important ceremonial places for the Indigenous community. 

Naomi Kantjuriny (b. 1944) 

An excellent hunter, basket maker and wood carver, Naomi took to painting with remarkable ease. She is recognised for her knowledge of the Tjukurpa stories of the area, and while she is a new and emerging artist her technique is well developed. Kantjuriny’s mother’s Dreaming is Malu or kangaroo. Kantjuriny is also a Ngangkari (traditional healer), providing treatments and practices of the mind, body and spirit. She was also a Wynne Prize finalist in 2017, having collaborated with Mona on the work hung at the time

Mona Mitakiki Shepherd (b. 1954) 

Shepherd’s career began in 1998. After a long break she returned to painting in mid-2003 and under the name Shepherd from 2005, following the passing of her husband. Shepherd was taught to paint by senior artist Kunmanara Katie Kawiny, a much-respected and revered artist. She was a Wynne Prize finalist in 2017, and her work can be seen in private and institutional collections including the National Gallery of Victoria. 

Tjimpayi Presley (b. 1967) 

Presley is the daughter of Tjampawa Katie Kawiny, who is also a mentor and a talented artist. Aside from also being an exceptional painter, Presley is well known for her punu woodblocks, which display intricate designs burnt into their surfaces using hot wire. 

Galleria Schettini, Milan, Italy; 

Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo, Italy; 

Private collection;

Sotheby’s, Modern and Contemporary, Sydney, March 2005, lot 60;

Company collection, Sydney;

Deutscher Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, April 2019, lot 55;

Private collection, Sydney 

“Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous mark-making and the textural layering of line and abstract form.

After travelling in Europe, Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955. Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana), who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London.

While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for its important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003.

Audette was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the June 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter.”

– Kirsty Grant for Deutscher and Hackett, April 2019

Private collection, Sydney; 

Shapiro Auctioneers, Australian and International Art incl. Chinese Contemporary Art from the Estate of Ray Hughes Session I, Sydney, 25 May 2021, Lot No. 47;

Private collection, Sydney

Dorothy Mary Braund is one of Australia’s most renowned female modernist artists. Her fascination with both everyday and public rituals of Australian culture inspired her most celebrated works. Bathers is an exquisitely composed example of a highly familiar scene, namely groups at the beach in Australia. 

Braund trained at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under William Rowell and Charles Wheeler, and later under the school’s first modernist teacher, Alan Sumner. Following her graduation she went on to study at the George Bell School, which had a major influence on her subsequent work. She developed a strong style expressed with a simplicity of colour, form and surface. 

Braund stated in 1994: “I’ve always been knocked out by simplicity. To me it’s got such impact; far more than anything fussy, because you have to get it right. There’s no chance for accidental effects. If you are simple everything has to relate and work.”1 Braund’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery, Monash University Museum of Art and the Cruthers’ Collection of Women’s Art. 

1. McCulloch, Alan and Susan (1994). The Encyclopedia of Australian Art -Revised and Updated. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Celestial – Terrestrial, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2019

“Angela Brennan has been making abstract paintings since the late 1980s, and the status of her chosen format has shifted ground several times over this period. She also makes figurative and text-based works, and there is a productive exchange between her abstractions and these other modes of working. The stylised forms of her portraits, for example, often look poised to dissolve into patterned shapes, whilst her abstract compositions sometimes name-check material that can appear incongruous as subject matter. Signalling an inner life made up of reading, looking, and listening, these references are wide in scope, encompassing popular culture, art history, philosophy, and more. The beguiling citations scattered throughout Brennan’s work build a potent self-image of the artist, reflecting her various interests, beliefs, and preferences. Brennan’s references productively complicate her painted imagery, provoking the viewer to engage with the work in new and unknown ways.”

—Graf, Michael, ‘Angela Brennan: Content Management’, Angela Brennan: 19 Desires and One Belief, Ed. Brennan, A., 3-ply, 2019, pp. 51-52.

Theodore Berman Collection, until 2017;

Private collection, Melbourne

Landscape painting was vitally important to the modernist artist Lina Bryans. It is interesting to note that this exuberant work is inscribed on the reverse “Darebin Bridge House”, Bryans’ Ivanhoe artist’s studio, which she also dubbed ‘The Pink Hotel’. This old coach-house became an artists’ colony for fellow modernist and avant-garde painters including Ada May Plante, Ian Fairweather and William Frater, who was a great admirer of European Post-Impressionism and the artists Cézanne and Van Gogh. 

Bryans’ iconic modernist portrait of the Australian writer Jean May Campbell, titled The Babe is Wise, is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

This montage was created by overlaying two photographic negatives, creating a simple yet enchanting floral composition. A variant of this image is illustrated in two books, both written by Professor Helen Ennis, Olive Cotton, Photographer, NLA, 1995, p63, and in Olive Cotton, AGNSW, 2000 (p. 51).

In 1929, at the age of 18, Olive Cotton became a member of the Sydney Camera Club and the Photographic Society of New South Wales. She graduated from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in english and mathematics. She joined Max Dupain’s studio shortly after completing her studies, marrying him in 1939. During the war years Cotton ran Dupain’s studio while he was away on war service. Today, she is recognised as a major contributor to Australian photography.

In 1929, at the age of 18, Olive Cotton became a member of the Sydney Camera Club and the Photographic Society of New South Wales. She graduated from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in english and mathematics. She joined Max Dupain’s studio shortly after completing her studies, marrying him in 1939. During the war years Cotton ran Dupain’s studio while he was away on war service. Today, she is recognised as a major contributor to Australian photography.

Collection of Conrad Kickert;

Beaussant Lefevre, Paris, 2014;

Private collection, Melbourne

Bessie Davidson & Sally Smart – Two artists and the Parisian avant-garde, Bendigo Art Gallery, 20 March – 26 July 2020; Innovative Australian Women, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 25 March – 31 July 2020; Lauraine Diggins Fine Art Collectors’ Exhibition 2017, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June – 29 July 2017; Australian Women Artists: Between the Wars, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 March – 25 April 2015

Bessie Davidson is known for her paintings of still lifes, interiors, portraits and landscapes, all of which are imbued with beautiful light, tone and colour. After settling in Paris, the artist’s adopted home from 1910 onward, Davidson’s exceptional talents were recognised both there and abroad when in 1931 she was appointed the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for Art and Humanity by the French Government. Her work was included in the exhibition Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013, and she was the subject of a book, A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris (Penelope Little, Craftsman House, 2003).

Davidson’s continuing interest in light, atmosphere and colour is perhaps most evident in her still-life paintings. The present work, Still Life with Bowl of Fruit, makes clever use of horizontal and vertical lines to focus the viewer’s eye, leading it around the picture plane. Davidson made particularly strong connections during her time in Paris, forming a large group of friends and becoming godmother to the daughter of Conrad Kickert, an artist, critic, collector and the original owner of this painting.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 1999; 

Private collection, New Zealand; 

Private collection, Sydney

Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1999

This distinctive assemblage of retro-reflective road signs epitomises Rosalie Gascoigne’s poetic use of found objects, particularly those containing text. Cut up into fragments, rearranged and composed in a grid formation, the panels display orderly shapes of text against a bright yellow background, the light-reflecting properties with a subtle ability to shimmer and shine. Gascoigne stated: “I don’t want it to be dramatically lit, but I do want it to sometimes flash at you, as road signs do, and then go sullen, then flash, like a living thing.” ¹

[1] Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 307, cat. 675

Buku Larrnggay Arts and Culture, Yirrkala NT;

Malaluba Gumana and Djirrirra Wunungmurra, Annandale Galleries Sydney, August 1 – Sept 12, 2015;

Private collection, Sydney

Malaluba Gumana’s cross-hatched water lily designs were created through her use of the marwat – a “hairbrush” that can create the finest of lines painted in natural ochres and pigments. A recipient of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for bark painting in 2013, Gumana mainly painted her mother’s Gålpu clan designs of dhatam (waterlily), djari (rainbow), djayku (file-snake) and wititj (olive python). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales as well as prominent private collections.

Painted at Utopia in December 1989;

CAAMA – Rodney Gooch, Northern Territory;

The Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Western Australia;

Sotheby’s, Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 30 June 1997, lot 49;

Private Collection, United States of America

In 1989 Emily Kame Kngwarreye produced her first paintings on canvas. At the time she was represented by the highly respected agent, Rodney Gooch at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). Rodney was one of the few agents to have worked with Emily throughout most of her career, and Anne Marie Brody acknowledges him as the source of Emily’s move to first paint on canvas with Emu Woman, 1988-89. In describing how unique and significant the artist’s oeuvre was, Anne Marie Brody states: “Photographs showing what other artists were producing, especially in 1989, the first year Utopia artists painted on canvas, are an instant reminder of just how much Emily Kame Kngwarreye stood out not only amongst her own Utopia crowd but right across the Western Desert.” 1 Artworks such as Awelye (meaning “my dreaming”) were among the first paintings on canvas to be produced by Emily. 

This seminal body of work set the foundation for her highly celebrated oeuvre in the years to follow. Awelye is a beautiful early reflection of Emily’s aesthetic where fluid configurations of dots and lines, representing seeds and growing yams, are rhythmically mapped across the canvas.

1. Anne Marie Brody, ‘Reflections on the Rodney Gooch Files,’ Indigenous Archives: The making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art, edited by Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean, UWP Publishing, 2017, p.46 

Private collection, Sydney 

Wynne Prize Finalist Award, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2001

Ildiko Kovacs’ magnificent painting entitled Escarpment was a finalist in the Wynne Prize in 2001. This fine example of her early work reveals a strong sculptural presence and vibrates with rich energy and passion. Ildiko’s work demonstrates a masterful grasp of paint’s materiality, with a bold and direct application of line and colour. She has a dazzling ability to sculpt line as if it were a three-dimensional form rendered flat. A number of these earlier and pivotal works open a dialogue between western traditions of abstraction and indigenous art.

Works by Ildiko Kovacs are held in National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery; Allen Arthur Robinson Collection; Artbank; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Campbelltown City Arts Centre; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria; Macquarie Bank; Maitland Regional Art Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Riddoch Art Institute; World Bank, Washington DC, USA; Visy Corp, Melbourne; Various private collections

Tjala Arts, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands, South Australia; 

Private collection, Sydney 

Minyima Tjuta – Many Women, Yaama Ganu Gallery and Tjala Arts, May 2021

Ngayuku Ngura is a vibrant depiction of Muna Kulyuru’s country located in the Amata community of the APY Lands, South Australia. Muna celebrates the beauty of the landscape with variations of deep earthy tones that contour landmark motifs. 

Tjala Arts is located in the Amata community, situated in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands. About 2500 people live in the region, which covers more than 103,000 square kilometres of arid land in the far north-west of South Australia. Amata is situated among the picturesque Musgrave Ranges, approximately 120km south of Uluru and 500km south-west of Alice Springs.

Celebrated artist Lindy Lee has received global recognition for her work and was recently honoured with a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. 

Lee’s wax and ink paintings are among her finest, inspired by the ancient Chinese flung ink paintings created by Zen Buddhists. These mark-making artworks are symbolic gestures referring to humanity, the universe and the Buddhist philosophy of eternity. She incorporates portraiture and abstraction showing her own cultural identity.

Celebrated artist Lindy Lee has received global recognition for her work and was recently honoured with a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. 

Lee’s wax and ink paintings are among her finest, inspired by the ancient Chinese flung ink paintings created by Zen Buddhists. These mark-making artworks are symbolic gestures referring to humanity, the universe and the Buddhist philosophy of eternity. She incorporates portraiture and abstraction showing her own cultural identity.

Pace Gallery, London;

Private Collection, Sydney

Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, US, 25-28 January, 2018

Berlin-based Canadian artist Beth Letain engages with the history of colour and abstraction. While her works feel minimalist compositionally, they are vivid with strong colour painted on white canvas. Letain’s geometric structures are harmonious and rhythmic, referencing Agnes Martin, Mary Heilmann and the Bauhaus theories of colour. This work is of magnificent scale with lashings of oil and rich pigment, so characteristic of the artist’s style. Her works are simple and enduring. 

Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney;

Private collection, Sydney

“Looking at a Fiona Lowry painting is never a passive exercise. Rather it requires a constant recalibration of the eyes, a focusing and refocusing that is as much about the artist’s unique technique as it is about the subject matter. Whilst Lowry’s project might be read as a contemporary response to the larger Australian art historical tradition of landscape painting – arguably the great Australian narrative – her use of airbrush to produce her works effects a kind of literal obfuscation of the landscape, lending her paintings a softness (something not often associated with the bush). The landscape appears as if through a clouded lens, or a dense fog. So too her characteristic palette, with it frequently alternating red and pink tones, lends the work a dreamy, nostalgic quality.”

– Alison Kubler, Fiona Lowry: The Ties That Bind, Martin Browne Contemporary, 2018 

Acquired from Waringarri Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia; 

Then by descent, private collection, Queensland 

This painting depicts the rolling hills at Rosewood Station, 100 kilometres from Kununurra where Queenie McKenzie resided as a cook. 

McKenzie was not only a remarkable artist and well-respected cultural leader in the Kimberley but she was also a law-woman. McKenzie ensured the efficacy of traditional cultural practices and the preservation of her heritage through song, ceremony and story. Through painting she inspired interest in and respect for her peoples’ connection to the land. 

Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills; 

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne; 

Private collection, Melbourne; 

Deutscher and Hackett, Part 2: Important Aboriginal Art, Melbourne 26 November 2014, Lot 104;

Private collection, Sydney 

This painting depicts Elizabeth Nyumi’s father’s country, Parwalla. It is a large area that fills with water after the wet season and consequently produces an abundance of bush foods. The painting shows a variety of native foods including bush raisin, bush tomato and seeds. Women, shown as U shapes, with their digging sticks and coolamons gathering the foods, are also depicted. 

Parwalla is a characteristic example of the work of Nyumi, one of the most-renowned, contemporary female Aboriginal artists. In her maturity as a painter Nyumi initially worked with a thick brush, covering the canvas in emanating lines in muted tones. The white, so pleasing and prevalent in her work, represent spinifex grass. She is an active member in the Balgo community, being a strong law and culture woman.

In 2004 Nyumi was selected for inclusion in the Biennale of Sydney. Her works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Artbank, Sydney; the Laverty Collection, Sydney; and the Holmes à Court Collection, Perth. 

Private collection, Brisbane

Margaret Olley: The Inner Sanctum, Philip Bacon Galleries exhibiting at Sotheby’s Galleries, Sydney, 2-17 March 2012, cat. 8

The Sound of Art, William Robinson Gallery, Brisbane, 14-25 July 2017

Margaret Olley’s Cornflowers and Red Lacquer Compot is both an exquisite and characteristic example of the revered Australian artist’s work. These deftly painted still-life pieces provide intimate insights into the artist’s life and home. Her Paddington studio, purchased in 1964, was famously forever-strewn with floral bouquets, eclectic pottery collections and arrays of fruit, all of which came to life on her canvases in richly painted compositions. 

Olley was the subject of two winning Archibald awards in her lifetime. The first was a 1948 portrait by William Dobell and the second a portrait by Ben Quilty in 2011, the same year that Cornflowers and Red Lacquer Compot was completed. The enduring popularity of these two portraits bears testament to her important role in the art world, both as a painter and a philanthropist. 

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney;

Dr Karen Helms, Christopher Day Gallery, Paddington;

The Estate of the Late Peter Morris, Sydney;

Private collection, Sydney

Autumn Exhibition 1989, Christopher Day Gallery, Paddington, Cat. No. 4

Born in Armidale, NSW in 1879, Thea Proctor was one of the best-known Australian women painters of her time. Studying in both Sydney and London, Proctor exhibited painted fans, inspired largely by the works of Charles Conder, at the 1907 Women’s Work exhibition in Venice. Upon her return to Australia she helped form The Contemporary Group with G.W. Lambert in order to encourage younger avant-garde painters. Her beautiful pictures underpinned Sydney Modernism throughout the 1920s, and in her later life she did a great deal to bring attention to the work of her cousin, John Peter Russell.

Philip Bacon Galleries, Queensland;
Private collection, Sydney

Ordinary industrial and household objects are revisited and given new life in Jude Rae’s elegant compositions, achieving a balance between representation and abstraction. In SL388, the artist characteristically challenges the viewer to reassess notions of beauty in these skilfully arranged and exquisitely painted utilitarian objects. 

Exhibited examples:

Hayward Gallery, London; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow; Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; Firstsite, Colchester, Complete Prints 1962-2001, 2001-02 (edition no. unknown) Rotermann Salt Storage, Tallinn; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; East-Slovakian Gallery, Kosice; Moravian Gallery, Brno; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, A Print Retrospective, 1962-2003, 2004-05 (edition no. unknown), Galerie Nicole Schlégl, Zurich, Bridget Riley – Grafische Werke, 2011 (edition no. unknown)

Bridget Riley initially became known as one of the proponents of Op Art in the 1960s – a movement that explored the effects of optical illusions in visual art. However, before the end of the decade her work had already evolved into a direction that made it clear that the Op Art label was rather reductive to Riley. Throughout her now six-decade-long career, Riley’s visual language has continually evolved in unexpected directions, exploring how we perceive the world through an elaborate investigation into the interactions of colour and form.

Her obsession with the act of perception has meant that Riley’s later work has evolved largely independently from trends in contemporary art, resulting in a highly unique visual language. The series of curvilinear works that she started in the late 1990s, and of which Going Across is a part, is a fine example of this. Although both the colour palette and the composition of overlapping curved shapes are minimal, the resulting work is full of rhythm and movement.

Another version of Riley’s Going Across is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Susan Rothwell is a renowned Australian architect and contemporary painter who resides in Sydney. In Dabee Winter the artist has skilfully built up the paint layers over a terracotta primed canvas. Both her exceptional gifts as a colourist and abiding fascination with Australian subject matter are evident in her joyous, atmospheric images. 

Susan Rothwell is a renowned Australian architect and contemporary painter who resides in Sydney. In Flowers with sailing boats in window, the artist has skilfully built up the paint layers over a terracotta primed canvas. Both her exceptional gifts as a colourist and abiding fascination with Australian subject matter are evident in these joyous, atmospheric images. 

Susan Weil is one of the most innovative female artists of the 20th century. She challenged the boundaries of abstract expressionism and was a key figure in the movement, which was predominantly defined by male painters including her ex-husband Robert Rauschenberg. Others included Willem de Kooning, Yves Kline and Jackson Pollock. 

Weil studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, and soon after moved to New York with Robert Rauschenberg in 1949. The couple were at the centre of the New York School along with fellow artists Cy Twombly, Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns. 

Walking Figure, 1969 is a highly important work by the artist, and she revisited this theme several times throughout the following 50 years. The shade of blue used here became one of Weil’s signature colours.

Weil collaborated with Rauschenberg on the Blueprints series between 1949 – 1951, however what is not widely known is that the idea behind the body of works was completely Weil’s; she had experimented with the monoprint technique since childhood. 

Weil’s work can be found in prominent art collections in the United States and Europe including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Weil is the subject of several monographic publications and exhibitions.