1960s - 1970s
An eventful and divisive decade in Australia’s history, the 1960s saw the birth of the civil rights movement and the successful 1967 Referendum, a pivotal time in the fight for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. There were greater moves towards equality for women in the workplace that was echoed within the art world. By the 1970s, in response to calls for change, the Women’s Art Register was established as a platform for research and advocacy of Australian women artists. Today it is a living archive of women’s art practice, representing over 5000 artists.
This disturbance of convention was reflected in the work many artists produced at the time. Abstractionism cemented itself in Australia well after it had appeared in America and Europe decades before. In 1968, one of the most iconic exhibitions in Australia opened at the National Gallery of Victoria. The Field featured works from 40 young artists – only three of whom were women – and sparked fierce debate amongst art critics, many favouring the more popular figurative painting style of the time. Despite this reticence, the movement took off among Australian artists, particularly women who experimented and explored the style without constraint, often moving between the mediums of painting, printmaking and drawing.
Artists such as Mary MacQueen produced spontaneous, expressive and gestural works where she sought to distil the character of her subject, mostly the landscape or animals, in the clarity of simple line via her preferred medium of printmaking. Barbara Brash also built an extraordinary print oeuvre, often combining several printmaking processes in her works, and embracing the power and potential of abstract forms through the synthesis of colour, gesture and texture in her impressions of the unique Australian landscape.
Many artists traversed visual arts and writing, no longer boxing themselves in, but rather embracing a multidisciplinary approach in their practice. While Madonna Staunton began as a painter, she moved into collage due to illness and increasingly chose written word to create her visual compositions; she was also a renowned poet. For Barbara Hanrahan, artmaking and writing were complementary endeavours and during her life she published 16 novels. In both mediums she was equally expressive and drew upon a mix of autobiography and witty social critique. Themes of sexuality, gender, family, nature and popular culture bleed from Hanrahan's strong lines, sharp contrasts, fantastical settings, and childlike figures, eliciting a sense of complexity and animation. Her work was fearlessly direct and unashamedly decorative in style and as such was often considered risqué.