MARIE HAGERTY - CMAG Catalogue

M A RIE H AGER T Y

OTTO

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2003 collage 68 x 55cm (fr) private collection, Canberra

2003 collage 68 x 55cm (fr) collection: The artist

ISBN: 978-0-9803534-2-6 Essay Text: Peter Haynes CMAG would like to acknowledge the lenders to this exhibition: The artist; Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria; Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Quensland; and private collectors in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.

Special thanks for their prompt and professional assistance to the staff from Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne and Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney.

Graphic Design: 2B.com.au Photography and scanning: Rob Little Digital Images

M A RIE H AGER T Y T HE RE AL T HING FRONT COVER: SMALL RED (detail)

YOU KEEP ON BALANCING AND BALANCING UNTIL THE PICTURE WINS (Howard Hodgkin)1

2006 oil on canvas board 74 x 59cm (overall) private collection, Canberra

In a room brochure for an exhibition of Marie Hagerty’s work held at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (Manuka) in 1988 I wrote that...colour plays a paramount role in her art...it is the means through which she perceives form, space, and light; and the device for creating compositional structure2. The issues referred to then still stand in Hagerty’s art today, although of course, we are now dealing with a mature artistic personality with a sophisticated understanding of her means and sources.

Hagerty’s art began in a figurative mode and often critiqued the work of both contemporary (Garouste, Baselitz, for example) and historical (DaVinci, Raphael) masters in ways that allowed her style to assert, and the style of her sources to be acknowledged in ways familiar to the student of the postmodern. The issue of her own stylistic language manifested itself very early in her career and in many ways her subsequent work can be seen as synthesis, analysis and distillation of her varied and idiosyncratic sources to create a language appropriate to the way she wants to express her view of her world. For her, art is a language that speaks of the person who created it, and must therefore be reflective of the experience of that person and is the tool through which she shapes and conditions her world.

1 2

Homes, A.M. The subject in question: Interview with Howard Hodgkin, Art Forum, Vol.34, No.5, Jan.1966, p.67 Haynes, P. Marie Hagerty, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, August 1988

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

PORTRAIT 2003 oil on board 50 x 50cm collection: the artist

Hagerty used colour as a means of building a perceptual and conceptual ambiance, an atmosphere in which the powers of colours to produce various sensations/reactions in viewers, is given free rein. She still does this and colour remains the major base from which she begins her aesthetic explorations. Colour is not a simple phenomena. It is a highly complex physical entity with equally complex emotional, psychological, aesthetic and philosophical counterparts. It is part of the real world of nature and a means by which we describe our world and differentiate between its parts and it is part of the abstract world of thought, of phenomena not easily defined. As all of these it is an essential part of Hagerty’s art.

If colour is foremost in Hagerty’s art, what of form? Like colour, form is a product of complexity. For Hagerty it is the structure that formally, aesthetically and conceptually balances colour. Her earlier work used an easily identifiable figurative idiom. This cued viewers into the work and allowed for the creation of personal narratives, the capturing of memory or the reading of the narrative as created, and as suggested by the artist.

The figures could be read as dramatis personae or protagonists in the pictorial drama as set up on the canvas. They also play a structural role in that they simultaneously activate and control spatial movement. They are part of the visual data used by the artist (and in that sense, abstract) and they are the actors in Hagerty’s visual theatre (and hence real). Unlike stage performers, Hagerty’s subjects are arrested in movement, in space and in time. They constitute part of the artifice that is a painting, and as such contribute to the capacity of the painted object to capture both the tangible and the intangible, the real and the abstract.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

FOCUS (G.B.) 2003 oil on canvas 60 x 60cm private collection, Sydney

The ostensible dichotomy between reality and abstraction, and the resultant visual tension produced by this, has become integral to Hagerty’s practice. For her, art is not reducible to its content. A work of art is a response to its subject not its subject. As such it is a separate entity, a thing that is seductive in its own terms and something that is both illusion and very real. Hagerty’s journey and her responses to the above over the last few years highlight the power of the art object as a presence in the world.

Portrait (2003) has as its starting point Gustave Courbet’s Study for Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (1856) in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Courbet (1819 - 1877) is regarded by most art historians as the founder of 19th-Century Realism, a movement which somewhat ironically opened the art world to new ways of looking that would ultimately lead to the iconoclasms of early 20th-Century Cubism3. That Hagerty is attracted to this artist and this painting lies in her embracing of the innate possibilities for acceptance of change that characterised Courbet and his art.

Courbet’s realism was as much grounded in his own socialist views as it was in changing the way we look. In his Study, the torso of a young woman, fashionably dressed, lies languidly, eyes half-closed, right arm parallel to her face and body, and hand beautifully delineated. The contrasts of the textural variances of skin, hair and a range of fabrics are carefully exposed in this suggestive and captivating image4.

3

F or a thorough, if not by now dated, study of Courbet’s art see Bowness, A. et al Gustave Courbet 1819 - 1877, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1978

4

O ne should note that the finished painting is even more suggestive, and causesd quite a stir when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

CARDINAL 2004 oil on canvas 168 x 152cm winner, 2005 Conrad Jupiter’s Art Prize collection: Gold Coast City Art Gallery

Hagerty’s response to the Courbet asserts her awareness of her individuality as an artist.

The woman becomes a young boy; the open gesture of the woman’s right hand beckoning to the viewer, becomes a flesh-coloured band disposed in a forthright diagonal across the front of the picture plane; textural contrasts remain, as does the languid, dream-like look; but the varied detail of Courbet’s background is subsumed into a lush, velvety space which threatens to envelop the boy.

This is a beautiful painting in which the source plays the role of beginning a dialogue with the artist. The dialogue, as always with Hagerty, is loaded and layered. Her use of art history is undeviating. Here, she celebrates the Courbet work by conversely subverting it: woman becomes boy; pattern becomes void; detail becomes geometry.

The relationship of source-artist-art history-object-viewer moves beyond anecdotal description to a process of distillation that captures the essence of the act of painting.

Another work from 2003, Focus (G.B.) may appear to be totally at odds with the outward realism of Portrait. Hagerty’s working method sees her working on a number of paintings at any one time. Each informs the other in ways which are not only subtle but often elusive and demanding of intimate viewer relationship with each work. I am not suggesting that one will find direct citations from one work to the next. Rather I am saying that the impact of working simultaneously and (often) serially on a number of works imbues each with a peculiar density of aesthetic and conceptual input, as though each reverberates from and into the other with an increasing subtlety of creative energy.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

VENUS POSE 2004 oil on canvas 168 x 152cm collection: Canberra Museum and Gallery

The G.B. in the title refers to Georges Braque, who with Picasso, as the founders of Cubism, is one of the great artists of the 20th-Century. Simply put, Braque was concerned with geometry, simultaneous perspective and the disassembly and reconception of everyday objects to the extent that the process of making pictures was the subject of the pictures. Narrative had no role to play here. That said, there remains a form of implicit narrative in such a multi-layered work as Focus (G.B.).

One feels that one is witnessing the making of the image through the projection of a series of veiled layers that almost express a state of reveries perhaps not unlike the faraway look of the boy’s face in Portrait?

Hagerty renders shading so that it looks both flat and 3-dimensional, and in doing so thus calls to attention the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.

This is an early instance of the artist’s perspicacious use of the edge. This speaks not only of the plastic relations between the various forms but also creates the spaces (or infers the existence of the spaces) between forms. This device brings a sort of compositional harmony to the work through its imposition of a softly vibrant, atmospheric light. There is a strongly ambiguous tenor present in this work. We are not told what we are looking at, other than it is a painted surface. Hagerty declares that that is sufficient. The reductivist vocabulary of both palette and forms belies the complex sensuality of this work.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

RED QUEEN 2005 oil on canvas 152 x 168cm private collection, Canberra

Cardinal (2004) is a marvellously proud and bold work with its splendidly limited palette and powerfully marked out forms. The predominance of red, black and white will continue throughout the period under discussion (2003 to 2007). Red is the colour worn by cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, black and white have strong religious associations and connotations too. All are symbolically and traditionally rich and their role in the Catholic liturgy is cleverly alluded to here.

Hagerty exploits contrasts in markedly overt ways. Forms overlap, overlie, intersect, in a carefully modulated procession, slow and dignified as if in an adagio. Whilst there is movement present there is also a feeling of time suspended, that we are viewing a visual equivalent of a particular moment or event. The artist will not disclose any further. We are looking at a painting in which the artist’s feeling for scale, awareness of space, sensitivity to light and ability to create a suggestion of depth whilst maintaining the integrity of the picture plane, are all beautifully achieved.

Venus Pose (2004) is a sophisticated combination of simplified and curvaceous shapes, eloquent lines and positive/negative spatial shifts, full of sensual allure and aesthetic resolution. It is a large work but the soft, almost pastel palette, softens the forms and imbues the work with an enticing tactility that invites close inspection and relaxes the viewers’ gaze. The simplicity of the composition is achieved partially through the sculptural qualities of the forms whose suggestive softness adds a further dimension to the painting’s sensuousness.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

LAST QUARTER II 2006 oil on linen 200 x 180cm image courtesy of the artist and Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne private collection, Melbourne (not in exhibition)

The forms are pushed right to the front of the picture plane – a device often employed by the artist. This moves the pictorial space out into that of the viewers. It is a device that not only invites participation but one that also demands the viewer’s full involvement with the totality that is presented to them by the artist. I have said that Hagerty’s work is complex. Venus Pose is no exception. It tells us that no single way of looking is sufficient.

The artist exploits the aesthetic possibilities of contrasting effects. So, for example, while the forms are pushed to the front of the picture plane, the spaces behind and between these clearly indicate a deep, perspectival space simultaneously at play on the canvas.

This visual (and conceptual) push-pull is a highly effective pictorial ploy used by Hagerty to create a tantalizing visual tension. Her use of the edge is once again effective and sure.

In this work the title (perhaps) gives entry into what might be the subject. Are the luminous curved forms simulacra for Venus’s body? They may be and they may not. If meaning is synonymous with image then perhaps this work’s essential elusiveness is its subject?

Hagerty has disavowed any descriptive ambitions for this painting in favour of the suggestiveness that flows from this enigmatic image.

Last Quarter II (2006) is a compelling and forceful painting. The palette is predominantly black and white (with small areas of grey judiciously added). The limited palette is however, radiant. Hagerty uses a brilliant ambient light to assist viewers in framing and sharpening their responses to this work. The large rhomboid shape occupying most of the mid- and fore-grounds is injected with a brilliant white sheen. The form juts forward and concurrrently pushes back into the pictorial space in a manner that is intrusive (conceptually) and comfortable (visually). What it does, and how it sits in the painting is absolutely right!

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

FOCUS I 2006 oil on board 63.5 x 63.5cm courtesy Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

FOCUS II 2006 oil on board 63.5 x 63.5cm courtesy Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Hagerty’s consummate control of spare contrasts is essential to the resolution of this work.

Her understanding of the importance of surface is again, consummate. Her surfaces are exquisite. They not only make us as viewers aware of them as separate entities, they point us to their role as a unifying element in any pictorial construct and they reveal painting as primarily an illustionistic practice.

If we agree with the great 17th-Century French thinker, Descartes (Optics) that a picture represents something by producing a special kind of experience in the viewer’s mind, then Last Quarter II certainly does that. The simplified forms intimate possibilities for a number of readings, but intimation is as far as Hagerty will go. For her the painting’s ability to present itself as something whole and fundamentally real, is enough.

The artist’s non-judgemental parries with the necessary fictions that constitute art always mean that our expectations will be upset. Focus I (2006) presents a clearly (?) discernible face (albeit with one eye covered with a red cross); a space divided by a clean, white rectangle and other less defined geometric shapes and painted photographic images (several times removed from their origins). Close examination, however, reveals a clearly unsettling spatial configuration. What appears to be sitting on something may not be.

The eye on the left-hand side of the picture may well have no real association with the eye on the right which we cannot see covered (or not) by the ovally configured red cross on a white ground. Pictorially of course all connections are real. This is a clever and mannered work in which the artist purposefully attempts to replicate the visual impact of collage through the medium of painting. The process is one of abstracting from one medium to create another. That, of course, is a statement that could be applied to all art. Hagerty’s strength in Focus I lies in her ability to manipulate her sources, in her understanding of pictorial and constructed space, and in the (unstated) power of the art object to absorb and (ultimately) transform the viewer.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

RIVAL METHOD 2006 oil on linen 200 x 180cm collection: Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria

Focus II (2006) is a similarly forceful image. The direction of the painted eyes into the viewers’ space forces us to accept the object as active participant in the relationship between artist and viewer. Spatial play and layering are adeptly employed in both these works in which the artist’s own manifesto is given clear expression.

Rival Method (2006) exemplifies Hagerty’s ability to produce more with less. This is a visual tour de force, a declarative and imposing aesthetic statement composed of minimal shapes and limited palette. Ambiguity is rife. An anthropomorphic reading is not out of place. Visually we are presented with a composite grouping of variously shaded red forms (counterposed with insertions of black and white) occupying two-thirds of the pictorial space moving inwards from the right. A trio of black forms appears to be moving, with Hagerty’s conspicuously (religiously) elegant slowness, from the left, insinuatively but possessively (they command the space). Other readings are readily available should we care to take that step. This work is read, as is all Hagerty’s work, according to the the viewers’ own experiences and understandings of the aestheticizing of individual experience.

The artist’s visual vocabulary draws on the different languages of abstraction and mimesis in ways that celebrate both individually, and applaud their coalescence. The force of the image lies in the artist’s moving through both languages to express her own reality.

What we see is the reality of the artist’s experience of her subject, intuitively composed of the languages that inform her practice. Abstraction and reality coexist. Hagerty is a representational painter, but not a painter of conventional appearance.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

SENTINEL 2007 oil on linen 200 x 180cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

CRUCIBLE 2007 oil on linen 200 x 180cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

FOCUS 007

SMALL BLACK AND WHITE CIRCLE

2007 oil on board 60 x 60cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2007 oil on canvas board 35 x 28cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

Focus 007 (2007) is a quietly modulated and sympathetically crafted work. Following on from what was discussed immediately above, and from the discussions of Focus I and Focus II, this work exemplifies Hagerty’s grasp of pictorial scale to effectively convey her subject. Here, eye is transformed into shape, gaze into absorption, shades of black (shadows) predominate. The artist’s use of edge is quietly effective and visually underpins the balance of opposites that constitute this work. Hagerty’s compositional method, as with much of her work, is operatic in its elision of the visual, the formal, the conceptual and the aesthetic, into a singularly apposite artwork in which the fugitive is given concrete form.

Hagerty’s romance with black/white/grey has resulted in works of immense visual and conceptual power. Sentinel (2007) is a subtle work which enthralls and seduces despite, or because of, the quiet invidiousness of its conquest. Forms familiar, though uniquely displaced, are layered and complicated within a whole that is satisfyingly replete.

Crucible (2007) makes opaque forms whose ubiquity was never a reality, but whose existence and continuing appearance, were predicated on the artist’s ability to give resonance to old forms in new configurations.

Cold Front (2007), like Rival Method, and like its predecessor Last Quarter II, is a remarkable painting. The moment it depicts may be unremembered, but the singularity of its is expression is brilliant. Surfaces are concurrently covered and revealed; pictorial scale is not only grasped but fully comprehended; and the complex transitions of internal and external scales assert the dynamism of Hagerty’s art.

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

BRUNNHILDE

P.O.3

2003 collage 68 x 55cm (fr) collection: The artist

2003 collage 68 x 55cm (fr) collection: The artist

DR OPTIC

JOKER

2003 collage 68 x 55cm (fr) collection: The artist

2007 collage 76 x 56cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

COLD FRONT 2007 oil on linen 200 x 180cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

Hagerty makes collages. A group from 2003 shows her using that medium as a means to allude to her wide-ranging excursions into art history, and particularly into art history where the serendipitous congress of theme and method result in relevant and telling art.

These look at the German Bauhaus and at Russian Suprematism, Constructivism and the art of Rodchenko and El Lissitsky. They also aver the complex interplay between the private world of the artist and the public world in which her creative expressions find themselves. Hagerty’s combines do indeed pay homage to the revolutionary graphic deliberations referred to above. They also show collage as a journey into the new, the possible and the imaginary. She continues to create inventive and absorbing collages.

These, such as Joker (2007) allow us to experience Alice’s journey through the Looking Glass – a journey of phantasy, reality and abstraction.

Hagerty’s most recent painted works are extraordinary. The compressed palette of works such as Red Duette (2007), Rival Method II (2007) and Legerdemain (2007) are ripe with allusions to the natural world. Viewing these works we learn to understand that space perceived is actually closer (to those who perceive it) than space actually experienced. Art does give form and shape to an experience, but in Marie Hagerty’s art the wonderful fiction that exists between reality and abstraction is maintained, and given beautiful expression.

PE T E R H AY NE S Director ACT Museums and Galleries October 2007

MARIE HAGERTY THE REAL THING

RED DUETTE 2007 oil on linen 200 x 180cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

LEGERDEMAIN 2007 oil on linen 205 x 155cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

SMALL RED CIRCLE

SMALL WHITE CIRCLE

RIVAL METHOD II

2007 oil on canvas board 35 x 28cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2007 oil on canvas board 35 x 28cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2007 oil on linen 200 x 180cm courtesy Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

M A RIE H AGER T Y BORN SY DNE Y, 1 96 4. L I V E S + W ORK S IN C A NBE RR A .

E DUC AT ION.

SE L E C T E D GR OUP E X HIBI T ION S .

1982–84 1987

2005 Into the Quadrangle RMIT University Project Space, Melbourne

Meadowbank College of TAFE, Sydney Graduated Canberra Institute of the Arts, Canberra

2004

E X PE RIE NC E .

1992–Present

1993-94

Lecturer (Part-time) Foundation workshop, Canberra Institute of the Arts Mannequin Art, ‘Dressed to Kill’, National Gallery of Australia

GR A N T S A ND AWA RD S .

1989–90 Capital Arts Patrons Organisation, Canberra

ACT Arts Development Board 1996 ACT Arts Development Board

Capital Arts Patrons Organisation, Canberra 1999 Art CAPO Grant to travel to Spain 2000-01 Mural on Facade of Design School of Music, Canberra School of Music, MGT Architects 2003 Canberra Art Prize, First Place

Acquisitive Prize, Canberra 2004 Awarded the John McCaughy Memorial Prize

S OL O E X HIBI T ION S .

2007 2005 2005 2003 2002 2001 2000 1998 1997 1991 1989 1988

Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Christine Abrahams Gallery, Vic Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Ben Grady Gallery Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra Crawford Gallery, Sydney Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra Canberra Contemporary Art Space III

004 Contemporary Australian Culture Now, 2 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Geelong Gallery Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Regional Gallery, Victoria 2003

Rotary World Convention, Queensland Art Gallery Scratch the surface, Canberra Contemporary Art Space The Year in Art, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney

2001

2000

Abstraction Spirit, Light Pure Form, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Public Artworks at the Australian National University On the Brink, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Roche Contemporary Art Prize, Sydney

1999

Meet 2x2, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

1997

Devoured by Paint, Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney

1996

Blundstone Contemporary Art Award, Touring Exhibition Prime Television Award, Touring Exhibition Fuss, Galerie Constantinople, Queanbeyan

1995

Moet & Chandon Travelling Exhibition, Touring Australia wide Wynne Salon des Refusés, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Canberra Contemporary Art Fair, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

1994

Rom Gallery, Sydney

1993

Here, Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra Crawford Gallery, Sydney Canberra Contemporary Art Fair, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra

1992

Compact Art, Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra

1991

Muswellbrook Exhibition, Muswellbrook

1990

Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra Canbrart Canberra Artists, National Gallery of Australia The Drawing Room, Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra

1987

Graduate Exhibition, Canberra Institute of the Arts

SE L E C T E D RE V IE W S A ND P UBL IC AT ION S .

2003 Scratch the Surface, Chris Chapman, Art Monthly Australia, August

Scratch the Surface, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Free and Indirect: The autonomy of form in Abstract Art, Matthew Holt, Art Monthly

1989 Review, Dramatic Beginnings to Career, Sonia Baron, Canberra Times

Review, Life Forces Sound Out in Hagerty’s Exhibition, Sasha Grishin, Canberra Times

2002 Review, Small Intimate paintings, Sasha Grishin, The Canberra Times, Tue October 8 Catalogue, From the studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, in conversation with Mary Eagle

1988

2001 Catalogue Abstraction : Spirit, Light, Pure Form, Tim Olsen Gallery

Catalogue, Roche Contemporary Art Prize

Black and White Magazine, Australia no. 54

Belle Magazine, Oct–Nov

ANU Reporter, Vol 32. No. 16 Catalogue, Recent Sculpture commissions at the ANU, Canberra 1997

Room Brochure, Recent Paintings, Deborah Clark

1996

Room Brochure, Fuss, Jonathan Nichols

1995 Catalogue, Moet & Chandon Touring Exhibition Review, Judy Watson Wins Moet & Chandon Fellowship, John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald Review, The Moet & Chandon Prize, Elwyn Lynn, The Australian

Review, Watson’s Blue Touch Kisses the Sky, Bruce James, The Age

Review, Champagne for the Mind, Paul McGillick, Financial Review

Review, Salon des Refuses, John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald 1994 Review, Elwyn Lynn, Weekend Australian Review, Vying for a Year in France, Nicole Bittar, Canberra Times 1993 Catalogue, Canberra Contemporary Art Fair, Drill Hall 1992 Interior Design, Vol.8 No.2, A Marriage of Convenience Review, Compact Art, Canberra Times 1991 Review, Unreal City, Michael Denholm, Art Monthly

Vogue Living November, Parallel Lives

Vogue Living December, Arts Diary 1990 Review, Desirable Works in Limited Format, Sonia Barron, Canberra Times Review, Canbrart, Peter Haynes, Art Monthly Review, Coats and Gascoigne, John Hawks, Art Monthly

atalogue, Peter Haynes, Marie Hagerty, Canberra C Contemporary Art Space III

C OL L E C T ION S .

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Canberra Museum and Gallery; Art Bank; ACT Legislative Assembly; Australian National University and numerous Private Collections.

M A RIE H AGER T Y