MELBOURNE.- Jenny Watson is a leading Australian artist whose conceptual painting practice spans more than four decades. This exhibition, drawn from the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia survey Jenny Watson: The Fabric of Fantasy, features works from the 1970s to the present, including examples of Watson’s early realist paintings and drawings, and a number of key series of works on fabric.

Heide Director & CEO, Dr Natasha Cica said: We’re delighted that this wonderful show travelled to Heide. Jenny Watson is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, and much of her work is powerfully grounded in suburban and subcultural Melbourne.

MCA curator, Anna Davis said: Inspired by both punk and feminism, Watson’s work uses distilled imagery and abbreviated text to create an intimate interior world. She has travelled widely since the 1970s and employs textiles collected on her travels as the surface for many of her paintings, which also often include collaged materials such as images from magazines, horse’s hair, ribbons, bows and sequins. Many of Watson’s works feature self-portraits and alter egos, a cast of longhaired women, horses, ballerinas, rock guitarists and cats, who enact life’s ongoing psychodramas.

Intertwining autobiography and fiction, Watson’s work incorporates snippets of diary-like text relaying the experiences, dreams and desires of a self-proclaimed suburban girl. The relationship between text and image is central to her work, which frequently includes a small panel of hand painted text that sits alongside a larger image, undercutting or changing its meaning.Watson refers to this writing as ‘the subtext of existence’, the inner dialogue we have been ‘trained not to think about while we are looking at art’.

The exhibition is complemented by a richly illustrated publication featuring an extensive curatorial essay by Davis, commissioned texts on various aspects of the artist’s practice by Rosemary Hawker and David Pestorius, and an interview with the artist by Louise Neri.