Jenny Watson
Born in Melbourne in 1951, Jenny Watson is an Australian painter and printmaker. She is a graduate of the National Gallery Art School which is now known as the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Melbourne. She has subsequently taught at the VCA during the late eighties and the mid nineties.

The birds, 2003

Watson's work, in her words is, ‘urgent passionate spare necessary psychological simple’. (source: Jenny Watson, artist’s statement in ‘ICI Contemporary Art Collection’, Melbourne 1989, p 84).

Influenced by her suburban Australian upbringing, Watson's work shows an interest in personal language, personal experiences and psychology. Her work is intimate and diaristic, drawing on childhood memories, resulting in crude 'childlike' imagery drawn onto fabric. Roughly drawn female figures (often herself) are prominent in her work, staged in a variety of narratives; domestic, yet slightly more extreme; a female figure being pecked to death by birds, or a figure lifting her skirt to the headlights of a truck. While the images may be 'childlike' or pertain to innocence, the underlying current is a little more sinister, the imagery suggesting that beneath the surface of things a world that implies sexual metaphor and uncomfortable hidden agendas.

Predominantly a painter, Watson also employs lithography and etching in her work. Often she will use herself in the imagery, creating self-portraits. The images are roughly drawn with paint onto dress-making fabric, rather than canvas, sometimes gluing in bits of hair or other personal objects and haberdashery. Recently (2011), she exhibited a body of work called Five Paintings about a mobile phone', at Greenaway Gallery in Adelaide. The imagery on fabric interposed with text, is humourous in its commentary on the social powers of the mobile phone and the identity of women in a contemporary world.

Watson has described drawing in her art practice, as the first notation, “usually as urgent as scribbling on a telephone pad.” She does not make elaborate studies for paintings, in fact she regards her paintings as large drawings, executed in paint. “The paint is usually squeezed directly onto the brush from the tube – with mixing taking place on the fabric”.
(source: Jenny Watson, “Notes on Drawing”, Letter to author, May, 2009 9 www.annaschwartz.com).

First travelling overseas in the 1970s, Watson was included in international survey exhibitions in the 1980s. From the 1990s, she has participated in an array of projects, exhibitions and residencies in Europe, Asia, India and the US.

Despite Jenny Watson’s considerable international success, her minimalist realism has been the target of some heated criticism when she was accused by one critic of bringing Australia into cultural disrepute with her 1993 Venice Biennale show. Watson's naïve style of drawing and painting were criticized for being unaccomplished and unskilled.

Watson's work makes reference to various art movements, including Pop Art and Arte Povera, for example, which allowed an unfinished or sketchy appearance, emphasizing process, not a finished work of art.

Jenny Watson has work in the following collections:

Armidale Art Gallery, Armidale NSW ,Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Artbank, Sydney, Australian Embassy, Washington, USA, Australian Law Courts, Melbourne, Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, BHP Billiton, Chartwell Collection, Auckland, New Zealand, Gold Coast City Council, Queensland ,Dresdner Bank, Frankfurt, Germany, Monash University, Clayton, Ghent Museum, Belgium ,Mildura Arts Centre, Mildura, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, Newcastle, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Queensland University, Brisbane, Ulmer Museum, Germany, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Vienna Academy of Arts and Craft, Vienna, Austria, Visual Arts/Craft Board, Australia

http://greenaway.com.au/Artists/Jenny-Watson.html

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