Abstract painting

After studying in Paris in the late 1920s, Grace Crowley became a leading modernist in Sydney and one of the first Australian artists to move into pure abstraction. She was deeply influenced by the concept of employing ‘abstract elements in building up a design’, as instructed by her French teachers, André Lhôte and Albert Gleizes. By 1932 the artist had established her own art school with ex-student Rah Fizelle, which became the principal centre for modernist painting in Sydney during the 1930s.

Crowley’s mature understanding of geometric design is evident in Abstract painting, 1953. The dynamic composition of overlapping forms and flat areas of colour holds at its centre a dark rectangle, dissected by brilliant-green diagonal planes. Created near the end of her most productive period, this work achieves a sophisticated balance and harmony of opposing

forces: colours, tones, shapes and lines. Furthermore, she employs the qualities of transparency and luminosity to suggest space, movement and light. Although the artist had been creating avant-garde geometric abstracts throughout the 1940s, it was not until the early 1950s, when Crowley was in her sixties, that a public gallery first exhibited her abstract paintings.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture