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Details
- Date
- circa 1945
- Media category
- Drawing
- Materials used
- brush and black and red ink, wash on paper
- Dimensions
- 31.9 x 20.3 cm sheet
- Signature & date
Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1993
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 532.1993
- Copyright
- © Estate of Joy Hester/Copyright Agency
- Artist information
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Joy Hester
Works in the collection
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About
In Melbourne’s wartime milieu, Joy Hester established the distinctive terms of her practice. She adopted ink drawing over painting as her primary medium and, harnessing the feel for transience that came with it, created turbulent psychological portraits and a repertoire of strange nervy bodies whose source of fear is never quite revealed.
Hester produced a vast and varied body of drawings during the war but often returned to figurative motifs of isolation, enclosure and disturbance. She stripped her subjects bare, inflating the eyes to the point that they stood in for the figure, and created dark, tormented enigmas of a confined self.
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Exhibition history
Shown in 5 exhibitions
Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 08 Mar 1995–04 Jun 1995
Australian drawings from the Gallery's collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 Dec 1997–15 Mar 1998
Michelangelo to Matisse: Drawing the figure, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 Nov 1999–27 Feb 2000
Joy Hester, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 14 Mar 2020–14 Feb 2021
20th-Century galleries, ground level (rehang), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 Aug 2022–2023
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Bibliography
Referenced in 4 publications
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Michele Helmrich, Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850–1965 from the Queensland Art Gallery collection, ''When Threads are Drawn Across a Nervous-Pattern. Joy Hester Man and tree', pg. 192-95, Brisbane, 1998, 192.
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Hendrik Kolenberg, Australian drawings from the Gallery's collection, Sydney, 1997, 75 (illus.). cat.no. 66
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Terence Maloon and Peter Raissis (Editors), Michelangelo to Matisse: drawing the figure, Sydney, 1999. cat.no. 127
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Anne Ryan, Look, 'Joy Hester: important addition to the Gallery collection', pg. 10-11, Sydney, Apr 2014, 10 (colour illus.).
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