Davida Allen: In the Moment

Davida Allen: In the Moment

3 May – 30 June 2018

Over more than four decades, Davida Allen has maintained her commitment to painting the moments of her life. Allen's work is concerned with the domestic realm: herself (as a mother, daughter, wife and grandmother), her family and the themes of love, sex, birth, life and death. In the 1980s, her small children and her rich inner fantasy life were her subjects. More recently, encounters with the landscape as a bushwalker and her role as grandmother are explored. This survey exhibition examines the distinctive aspects of these key themes and subject matter in her works.

As a student, Allen studied under both Betty Churcher at Stuartholme School and Roy Churcher at Brisbane Technical College (precursor to the Queensland College of Art and Design). Since the early 1980s, Allen has been consistent in her approach to painting, working most often in oil paint, initially on canvas, and more recently on marine-grade plywood boards. Stylistically, her raw simplification of figurative forms is combined with bright, often pure use of colour, and heavily impastoed and gestural paint surfaces.

Fellow artist William Robinson recently stated: ‘To examine Davida’s images is to come into direct communion with her life.’ Whether her medium is oil paint, pastel, celluloid, or words on the page, Allen’s works are powerfully communicative; full of sharp, satirical humour and love, but also death, frustration and mess—both bodily and emotional. In a 1999 interview she said: ‘We’ve been singing the same song ever since I started painting pictures; it’s just that the instruments are different, the words are different, but the philosophy is the same. Who am I? What are women? Where is our role in humanity?’

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About the artist

Davida Allen, Born 1951, Charleville, Queensland, lives and works in outer Brisbane

Davida Allen is known for her strongly gestural painting style that uses heavy brushstrokes and a bold colour palette to explore life as an artist, mother, wife and grandmother, domestic life, family and the human condition. Her works often portray the tension between creative energy and domestic responsibilities.

Allen has published the 1991 novel The Autobiography of Vicki Myers: Close to the Bone which led to her writing and directing the film Feeling Sexy, which was presented to acclaim at numerous film festivals including Venice International Film Festival in 1999.

As a student, Allen studied under both Betty and Roy Churcher, at Stuartholme School and Brisbane Technical College respectively, and began exhibiting with Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane in 1973. Allen won the 1986 Archibald Prize for a portrait of her father-in-law Dr John Shera, and was awarded the Tattersall’s Landscape Prize in 2010. She is represented in all major Australian public collections, as well as the Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.

Selected exhibitions include National Self-Portrait Prize: Look at me looking at you, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2017); GOMA Q, QAGOMA , Brisbane (2015); Davida Allen: Survey Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (1988); ROSC: the poetry of vision, The Guinness Hop Store and The Royal Hospital, Dublin (1988); Painters and Sculptors, QAGOMA , Brisbane, Museum of Contemporary Art , Saitama (1987); Davida Allen, National Gallery of New Zealand, Wellington (1986) and touring throughout New Zealand; An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1985); Transformation: Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of NSW , Sydney (1985); Kunst Mit Eigen-Sinn, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (1985); D'un au tre Continent: L'Australie le reve et le reel, Musee d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (1983); Fourth Biennale of Sydney Vision in Disbelief, Art Gallery of NSW , Sydney (1982); Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of NSW , Sydney (1981).