(Abstract painting)

Grace Crowley is a pioneer of abstraction in Australia. She is particularly noted for the exceptional paintings that she produced from the 1940s, where she extended elements of her earlier cubist works and created constructivist compositions that were built on the expressive potential of dynamic colour and shape alone. Making the radical leap into total abstraction, Crowley’s works were amongst the first non-objective paintings produced in Australia.

After initiating a traditional art education in Sydney in 1907, Crowley studied in Paris in the late 1920s under the cubist artists André Lhôte and Albert Gleizes. She attended Lhôte’s summer school in Mirmande and visited Gleize’s art colony Moly-Sabata, later speaking of the impact of these experiences on the development of her work. Returning to Australia, Crowley had co-founded one of Sydney’s first modern art schools by 1932, where she taught the theories of academic cubism as well as the geometric systems of dynamic symmetry. Through her work as both artist and teacher, Crowley influenced a key group of modernists in Sydney and became significant in advancing the city’s contemporary art movements.

Crowley developed her painting within a close network of progressive artists; she had a particularly close aesthetic alliance with painter Ralph Balson, but it is the distinctions of her own work for which she is now celebrated. Her intensely coloured, geometric compositions pulsate with an innate energy, encapsulating Crowley’s belief in the correspondences between the rhythms of her abstraction and the systems of the universe.

'Abstract painting', (1950) is an exceptional work within Crowley’s concentrated oeuvre of non-objective paintings. A rhythmic construction that oscillates between open linear shapes and block-coloured forms, the work clearly visualises the distinct terms of Crowley’s geometric language of abstraction. The vivid colouristic surface has a luminous impact which furthers the energised choreography of the composition.

While Crowley’s works are products of her Sydney milieu, the utopian ideals underpinning her abstraction speaks of modernism’s internationalism. Characterised by notions of colour, light and rhythmic construction, Crowley’s paintings link to the essential ideas informing the global movements of abstraction and the uncompromising claim of its artists that representational modes could no longer poetically embody the modern condition.