The first state art museum retrospective of one of Australia’s great artistic visionaries

Janet Dawson (born 1935) is one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists. Throughout a distinguished career spanning over seven decades of practice, she remains an artist who has refused to be bound by rules.

Dawson’s practice is impossible to neatly categorise. She emerged as a strikingly distinct abstract painter in 1960s Melbourne and Sydney. In 1973, she won the Archibald Prize for portraiture, only the third woman in history to receive this award. By the 1990s, over decades living on an isolated property at Binalong, NSW, she developed an arresting form of realism that she used to paint the everyday objects and environments around her.

A pioneer of both abstraction and realism in Australian art, Dawson sees no contradiction in working between diverse stylistic and aesthetic realms. Consistent to her art is a sense of curiosity: she is constantly interested in material existence and the state of the natural world.

This comprehensive retrospective, and its accompanying publication, give overdue attention to an influential artist, and show the full diversity of Dawson’s practice.