DeKooning's Womans

Abstract

DeKooning’s Woman is a large-scale creative work featuring around 30 paintings, sculptural works, prints and drawings that are in dialogue with exemplary late Modern painter Willem DeKooning. Seizing on the lasting influence of DeKooning as canonical Master and maligned misogynist the work explores an alternative representation of the ‘Women’ DeKooning is both celebrated and notorious for.

Research Contribution: Central to the work is a nuanced feminist appraisal not simply of Dekooning but of the ongoing popularity of painting practice strongly aligned with (authenticity, masculine subjectivity). The works central contribution is a unique practice that counterposes the emotive spontaneous and emotive gestural language of abstract expressionism with a more domestic and decorative visual language usually deemed exterior to it.

Research Significance: Produced with assistance of an Australian Council grant the work has so far been exhibited in four different venues. The bulk of the work was shown in the 2020 solo exhibitions The Landscape is in the Woman, Sullivan and Strumpf, Sydney and Maybe I Was Painting the Woman in Me, Milani Gallery, Brisbane. A selection of work was also featured in the group exhibition The Abyss at Griffith University Art Museum, 2019 and the public art exhibition Razzle Dazzle in Brisbane 2020. The project has been discussed in Art Guide Australia, featured in Vault Magazine and was also recently reviewed in the journal Artform International. In 2020 one work from the project was awarded the Sunshine Coast Art Prize, another was a finalist in the Mornington Peninsula Works on Paper prize (2019).