SYDNEY.- The Art Gallery of New South Wales is presenting Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close – the first retrospective of one of Australia’s great artistic visionaries. Spanning more than six decades, this exhibition delves into Janet Dawson’s distinguished career and highlights the extraordinary range of her art practice.

Dawson is a prolific artist whose exuberant creativity defies accepted artistic conventions. Working since the late 1950s, she has been a forerunner of major movements in Australian art and has embraced a wide range of styles and mediums including painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture. Throughout her career, Dawson has moved between her own arresting forms of abstraction and realism, making her an artist difficult to categorise.

Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close unfolds chronologically with more than 80 works drawn from major Australian public and private collections, including many rarely seen by the Australian public. Visitors will encounter important paintings from across Dawson’s career, from superb abstract paintings, including The origin of the Milky Way 1964 and Old cloudy moons 1 and 2 1979, to her later explorations of the natural world in Scribble Rock cauliflower 1993–97, Scribble Rock pomegranates 1999 and Moon at dawn through a telescope, January 2000 2000.

Art Gallery of New South Wales director Maud Page says: ‘This major exhibition gives overdue recognition to one of the visionaries of late 20th-century Australian art. Janet Dawson is a pioneer of abstraction and an artist with a distinct realist style, yet her important contributions have been under-acknowledged.

‘This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to discover one of the most singular voices in Australian art, and I’m immensely proud that the Art Gallery is part of this important milestone in Janet Dawson’s remarkable career.’

Born in Sydney in 1935, Dawson is now 90 years old and lives in Ocean Grove, Victoria. She studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1952 to 1956. She was awarded a travelling art scholarship in 1957, supporting her travels to London where she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. Winning a further scholarship while in London, she travelled to Italy and worked in Anticoli Corrado, outside of Rome, where she created her first important abstract series of drawings based on the surrounding landscapes. She later joined the Atelier Patris in Paris, where she worked as a proof printer and produced her own groundbreaking series of lithographs.

Dawson returned to Australia in late 1960 with a greater knowledge of European modernism and contemporary American painting. These influences inspired her to create her own bold abstract style, and she rapidly emerged as a new star of contemporary painting when she began exhibiting in Melbourne and Sydney. In 1968, Dawson was one of only three women included in The Field, the influential exhibition of Australian abstraction that opened to acclaim at the National Gallery of Victoria and toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1973, she won the Archibald Prize for a portrait of her husband, theatre director and playwright, Michael Boddy – becoming only the third woman to receive the prize at that time.

By the 1970s, she was replacing her hard-edge abstract paintings with works that were more directly influenced by the sensations, formations and experiences of the natural world. In 1974, Dawson moved with her husband to Binalong in regional NSW. Later that decade, they bought a property farther into the bush, which they named Scribble Rock. Dawson’s shared existence with Boddy of organic farming became the stuff of her every day, and her life at Scribble Rock became inextricably linked with her art. It was there in the 1980s that she made the shift from abstraction to a new form of realism as she lingered over the ‘things’ that her rural world presented – for example, onions, cabbages and cauliflowers feature in her still-life works. She equally painted the sublime expanse of Binalong skies in commanding works featuring the moon, clouds and stormy atmospheres.

Dawson remained in Binalong until the passing of her husband in 2014. The work produced there over four decades reflects her deep immersion in rural life and her fundamental understanding of the energies governing the natural world, a focus she continues exploring to this day.

Denise Mimmocchi, exhibition curator and Art Gallery of New South Wales acting head of Australian art, says: ‘Janet Dawson has always been an artist who has refused to be bound by rules. She moved between abstraction and forms of realism at a time when these modes were viewed as diametrically opposed.

‘At every stage of her career, her work has been driven by an intense curiosity about the surrounding world, from its minute details to the expanse of the cosmos. She has produced works of remarkable distinction and technical finesse that, while stylistically diverse, all probe the nature of being and suggest the forces driving everyday existence.’

Prior to this landmark retrospective, Dawson has been the subject of several survey exhibitions, including at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1979, the National Gallery of Australia in 1996 and the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2006, the latter touring to SH Ervin Gallery, Queensland University Art Museum, Tasmanian Art Gallery and Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery between 2006 and 2007. Her work is held in all major Australian national and state public collections and in numerous private collections.

The exhibition is accompanied by the most comprehensive publication ever produced on Dawson’s art, featuring insightful contributions from Denise Mimmocchi, the Art Gallery’s assistant curator of Australian art Monique Leslie Watkins and art historian Jennifer Higgie, as well as an archival text by the late Professor Virginia Spate.