Louise Hearman
Untitled #425, c.1996
oil on board
61.0
x 46.0
cm
Provenance
Robert Lindsay Gallery, Melbourne
Acquired from the above on 18 February 1998
"Hearman's paintings bring to light the scattered thoughts, memories and impressions that pass through her mind. She imposes no order on this material, and looks for no master narratives. She is as much conduit as creator. Her goal is to make these spectral images as concrete as possible. It is not enough for her to merely suggest an object - she wants to depict it in perfect clarity, spotlit against a darkened backdrop. We emerge from Plato's cave, flick a switch and feel the shock of recognition" (John McDonald, Louise Hearman, MCA, Sydney, exh. cat. 2016, p.18)
Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Louise Hearman is Australia’s leading practitioner of the uncanny. Her paintings invite the viewer in with a beautiful and familiar point of reference – a landscape; an animal; a portrait – only to have this initial illusion broken by a startling, at times sinister point of contrast – a legless figure floating above a moor; or the face of a child emerging from the anthers of a flower. It is this irrational and inexplicable characteristic that gives Hearman’s work its seductive quality.
Stemming from a school of artists out of Melbourne who deal with the darker side of life – Albert Tucker, Peter Booth, Bill Henson to name a few – Hearman since her first exhibitions has created a unique, almost gothic style with a vocabulary of potent symbols, bold, painterly brushstrokes and a masterful control of light. Taking after the surrealists, Hearman is candid about the automatic nature of her process saying that often while painting “You wake up half-way through and wonder what you’ve been doing.” That surreal tendency, and especially the pairing of nature with young girls, is reminiscent of Dorothea Tanning, with whom Hearman shares a fascination with the disquieting and the bizarre.
Born in Melbourne in 1963, Louise Hearman studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, and began exhibiting in 1987. Most recently, a major solo exhibition Louise Hearman: Against the Grain was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2016. In 2016, Hearman received the Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales; and in 2014 she received the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.
