In her catalogue essay for this exhibition, curator Anna Davis quotes artist Jenny Watson describing her oeuvre as being the act of "[filtering] the life of a suburban girl through a conceptual lens".
Using her daily experience and personal history as the subject, Watson paints female figures in a naive style, often with text alongside – thus deconstructing the idea of a 'painting' as a realist, singular image. Often these works are created on fabric.
It hasn't always been so: in the early 1970s she painted in a realist style, using photographic sources – before transitioning to a more distinctive, personal style, influenced by the conceptual art movement. Watson's early work was also influenced by Melbourne's 1970s punk scene (evidenced in this exhibition by a 1977 portrait of Nick Cave, an art student of hers at one time) and New York's 1970s feminist movement.
This survey exhibition will take in almost five decades of practice – from work made in the early 1970s, to new paintings.