Dale Hickey Catalogue

DALE HICKEY LIFE IN A BOX Foreword Chris McAuliffe 3 Dale Hickey: Life in a box Paul Zika 5 A portrait of the artist as quiet achiever Chris McAuliffe 9 On three decades on John R Neeson 13 Is there a soul? Domenico de Clario 17 Overseas connections John Stringer 21 Deep flat: the paintings of Dale Hickey Stephen Haley 27 Dale Hickey: biography and bibliography 33 Catalogue of works in the exhibition 39 1 Photograph (detail): Sonia Payes, from Untitled. Portraits of Australian artists, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2007. Courtesy Sonia Payes FOREWORD Dale Hickey: Life in a box is an opportunity for the Potter to present the work of an artist whom many Victorians hold dear. For some, Dale Hickey is an epitome of diligence and persistence; an artist whose consistent and meticulous attention to the things that surround him stands as a model of artistic dedication. For others, he was a teacher of robust and idiosyncratic views; an artist who did what a great teacher does, authorise the experimental impulses of his students. For still others, Hickey is a somewhat enigmatic figure; a painter who managed to traverse the history of abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism as well as more conventional genres such as still life. In all, Hickey’s work appears simultaneously rigorous, human and challenging. Our guest curator, Paul Zika, has brought his own challenging rigor to the exhibition. It grows out of a long-term research project documenting individual survey exhibitions of Australian artists after 1970. It is a project concerned with one of the fundamental paradoxes of recent Australian art; the relative invisibility of an artist’s oeuvre in an age in which the art market and information technology alike are booming. Zika and his research partners are redressing two blind spots in Australian art. First, many survey exhibitions have been staged but the record of them is patchy and difficult to access. Second, the parameters of the survey exhibition are rarely critically assessed. In this exhibition, Zika seeks to enhance the record of exhibition with a substantial catalogue and variety of distinctive interpretative essays. And, in presenting a thematic and highly reflective selection of works, he steps away from the usual foundations of biography and style. The Potter is pleased to have worked with Paul Zika and a range of important research and institutional partners on this project including Jonathan Holmes, Maria Kunda and Jeff Malpas from the University of Tasmania; David Hansen and Craig Judd from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and the Australian Research Council. Our enthusiasm for the project has been matched by generous public and private lenders, who have enabled us to present a remarkable range of works. We also thank the catalogue essayists commissioned by Paul Zika who have fired the opening salvos in what we hope will be an ongoing conversation on Hickey’s art. Dr Chris McAuliffe Director, the Ian Potter Museum of Art 2 3 DALE HICKEY: LIFE IN A BOX DALE HICKEY: LIFE IN A BOX Paul Zika Dale Hickey is constantly concerned with the evolution of The catalogue is intended to give a sense of a period the painted image—that translation from object to canvas and the position of painting within that time, rather than that is elemental to painting. Apart from occasional forays a personal history of the artist. There are however two into the landscape, these objects are drawn from his aspects of Hickey’s life that do warrant particular attention immediate domestic environment. This survey exhibition here as they have not been dealt with in the existing concentrates on paintings made since the early 1980s that substantial body of writing on the artist, and they do focus on the immediate confines of the artist’s studio and directly impact on his practice and career. In 1971, during the objects within it. There is a continual reworking and the well-documented ‘conceptual’ phase after 1969 when rearranging of a range of items—easel, trestle table, canvas, he stopped painting, Hickey went to Europe and the auto-tray and many smaller objects—presented frontally United States of America. The trip became an important within a shallow stage-like space. Within these paintings ‘retreat’—a period of doubt, contemplation and reflection— there is an ambiguous play between the format of the which lead to his returning to Australia recommitted to actual stretcher and the depiction of a canvas within the painting. John Stringer, who met Hickey in the process of studio onto that painted surface. At its most reductive assembling The field exhibition at the National Gallery a blank canvas becomes an illusionistic object, taking of Victoria in 1968, had already moved to New York and up most of the painting. Elsewhere a simple grid division provided accommodation for the artist and his family there, on the surface is confused with the frame of the window. witnessing this important phase. These beguiling shifts between object and image go beyond Both before and after this critical trip, Dale Hickey was an a sophisticated facility with visual vocabulary and the influential teacher and personality at Preston Institute of incorporation of various stylistic approaches. This original Technology at a time when there was a strong conceptual synthesis of the flat and illusionism sets up a dynamic undercurrent within that institution. Dale fostered an ‘open’ confrontation with the viewer. While the objects are stacked classroom environment, not based on attitudes emerging back against the wall within a shallow space, we are given from Paris or Düsseldorf, but on the writings of the English little breathing room; we are pulled head first into that educator AS Neill. Anyone involved in teaching painting space. then who was also engaged in contemporary thinking had Dale Hickey’s paintings are normally untitled and pro- to constantly question the relevance of their discipline, and duced in series; the window, the easel, the trestle, the if they didn’t, their students would have—particularly in the blank canvas leaning or hanging. Up to three from each hothouse that was Preston Tech (and subsequently Phillip series have been selected for this survey, with only one Institute of Technology). The often ignored double role of displayed per room. This exhibition is configured to artist-teacher is central to Hickey’s practice, and catalogue highlight shifts in pictorial space and the way in which contributor Domenico de Clario was there as a young the viewer is catapulted into an engagement with it. teacher alongside him. The works are punctuated with selected earlier works in While Chris McAuliffe has regularly written on the artist’s which that frontality is pre-empted—as in the late 1960s work he has also been a long-time chronicler, commentator reductive abstractions of domestic grids or the patterned and critic of Australian art. He is well qualified to locate Cottlesbridge landscapes—or alternatively there is a Dale Hickey’s work within (and outside) the broader detailed analysis of conventional illusionism through the theoretical debates that have ebbed and flowed over the genre of the still-life tableau. This catalogue reflects some last forty years. On the other hand, John R Neeson’s journey of the juxtapositions of the exhibition hang, but doesn’t as a painter has almost mirrored Hickey’s—moving from attempt to reconstruct that physical experience. reductive abstraction to a highly rendered illusionism, coupled with extensive research on the genre of the still life. Stephen Haley provides the observations of a younger Untitled 1986, 183 x 183 cm (cat. 20) generation painter, seeing merit and relevance in Hickey’s work at a time when the discipline wasn’t considered cool and those seeking to persist with painting were searching for guiding lights. 4 5 DALE HICKEY: LIFE IN A BOX Night table 1990, 183 x 274 cm (cat. 26) This exhibition is an outcome of an Australian Research I am indebted to the original research team with Brigita Council (ARC) Linkage Grant between the University of Ozolins and Philip Hutch as our research assistants; the Tasmania and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery team at the Ian Potter Museum of Art for taking on the (TMAG) in 2002. Having investigated the role that solo realization of the project, particularly Bala Starr’s guidance survey exhibitions played in the presentation of Australian and advice; and most importantly Dale Hickey’s and art in public art museums over the past four decades, the Rosemary Hickey’s support and patience. research team of Jonathan Holmes, Paul Zika, Maria Kunda Within the specific confines of his studio, Dale Hickey and Jeff Malpas (from the university), and David Hansen teaches us much about the language of picture making and (from TMAG) set out to determine a suite of six solo survey the persistence of painting in the continuation of that shows that would be the focus and primary output of exploration. Yellow 1993, 183 x 183 cm (cat. 30) the research. In the protracted deliberations over choice and the multiple determinants that could be employed, the inclusion of a painter kept re-emerging in that mix; the discipline of painting seemed an integral element in providing an overview of artistic practice in Australia Guest curator Paul Zika is a Hobart-based artist and curator. He teaches since 1970. We decided on Dale Hickey as much for his painting at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania. diverse, eclectic, and at times unorthodox approach, as his persistent inquiry. I have followed his work since The field exhibition (when I was a first-year painting student at RMIT) and the early Pinacotheca days (when the gallery was located in St Kilda), but I met Hickey for the first time only in February 2005.

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