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Judy Cassab: Landscapes from the Collection

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

29 May - 31 August, 2008
Australian Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, Sydney

The latest in AGNSW's series of focus exhibitions on Australian art is a rich assortment of landscape paintings and drawings by renowned artist Judy Cassab. The collection includes 14 works spanning 1959-2003.

Her travels to central Australia, the first in 1959, confirmed for her that Australia was truly her spiritual home. In the diaries she has kept her whole life, the formal presentation of which won her the Nita Kibble Literature Award in 1996, she wrote, "My eyes burn from the vivid colours of the day. I have never experienced this... it's a physical force, hitting you not only frontally but sideways and from the back... I understand, for the first time since arriving in Australia, that one can love the soil".

Cassab gained a reputation for her distinctive expressionist technique but her discovery of the Australian landscape incited wonderful abstraction in her style, which had always been a blend of this and figurative skills.

Since her first solo exhibition in 1953, Cassab has held more than 70 exhibitions throughout Australia and overseas. She is the only woman to have won the Archibald Prize twice, in 1960 for Stan Rapotec and in 1969 for Margo Lewers, and has a string of other art prizes to her name. For her services to visual art she was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire), an AO (Officer of the Order of Australia) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney.

Emma McGowan