Rubies and Lemons

Joy Hester, Face in Close Up , 1947. Joy Hester was born in Elsternwick, Melbourne, in 1920. She is responsible for some of the most psychologically penetrating images in Australian art. Hester was the only female member of the Angry Penguins, a modernist literary and artistic movement active in the 1940s, comprising poets, artists and intellectuals, but until comparatively recently she has been largely overlooked in published art histories. Her expressionistic drawings were made rapidly on paper, with brush and ink, usually as she sat on the floor. She would complete sometimes a dozen works in a sitting, one after the other, in a stream of consciousness reverie, one image suggesting the next. Her pictures are direct and compelling; sometimes they are bleak or tragic. Various motifs are recurrent: a lone female head; a woman with her brooding, shadowy male lover positioned behind her; faces with mismatched, bulging eyes. Her stark, uncompromising images of love, grief, loss and des...

        Leon Golub, Bite Your Tongue Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, 2015. I first discovered Leon Golub’s paintings as an art student in the late 1970s, when I saw some of his pictures reproduced in a magazine. At that time his images of soldiers and other figures interested me but I felt somehow detached from them. After all, what experience did I yet have of other people’s inhumanity – or even my own? Television news reports of wars and invasions were still a fairly abstract background hum to my life at that early stage. It is only in the past few years, now that I am middle-aged, that I have had the opportunity to see Golub’s paintings in the flesh.   With the added benefit of life experience, they now appear rich and significant, terrible and deeply tragic. They move me. This survey exhibition, Bite Your Tongue , at the Serpentine Gallery, is the first time that the artist’s work has been shown in London since 2000. The early works deal with myth...