Being and Nothingness

The importance of Bea Maddock has long been recognized, and her work has been the subject of survey exhibitions in 1968, 1970, 1980 and 1982. It is timely now to bring together Maddock’s work from 1960 to the present. The works selected represent her career – from studies at the Slade School, London, to current work in Launceston, Tasmania.

During the 1960s Maddock was recognised primarily as an innovative printmaker who challenged easy decorative formulas with imagery that stressed the private and personal in the context of a fragmented and increasingly dislocated century. The subjects of her early expressionistic woodcuts included an anonymous figure pacing an empty street, disjointed words and phrases, and images based on the legend of Icarus, All were metaphors for the artist’s own identity.

Maddock returned to painting in the late 1970s, producing word-images and works that also incorporated collage and photographic elements.

Curated by Roger Butler, Curator of Australian Prints at the Australian National Gallery, and Anne Kirker, from the Queensland Art Gallery, the exhibition featured a selection of Maddock’s works, including prints, paintings, drawings, and artist books. Notably, the exhibition included her renowned series Forty Pages from Antarctica, created following her participation in the ‘Artists in Antarctica’ program in 1987.