Janet Dawson retrospective at AGNSW celebrates six-decade career of acclaimed Australian artist

For four decades, Archibald-winning Australian artist Janet Dawson lived on a farm in the bush near Binalong, a small town in the Southern Tablelands of NSW.

She moved there in 1974 from Sydney with her husband, Yorkshire-born theatre-maker Michael Boddy, and there they stayed, growing organic vegetables and revelling in country life, until his death in 2014.

Each evening, she studied the night sky, observing the Moon and the stars with her artist’s eye.

The Moon — depicted in works such as Moon at dawn through a telescope, January 2000 — became an important symbol in Dawson’s work, representing feminine power.

“She’s painting the brilliance of the skies in all their infinite glory,” Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), tells ABC Radio National’s The Art Show.

“You can see this woman contemplating the Moon and the stars and bringing them in close through her practice.”

These works mark Dawson’s passage from one of Australia’s most prominent abstract artists in the 60s to an acclaimed figurative painter of the natural world.

In 1973, she became the third woman to win the Archibald Prize, with her portrait of Boddy, which recently toured Australia as part of the Archie 100 exhibition.

Now, at 90, Dawson is being recognised in her first retrospective at a state art gallery, at AGNSW, in Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close.

Rule-breaking art

Dawson’s artistic talent was evident from an early age, prompting her mother to enrol her in adult classes with esteemed Melbourne artist H Septimus Power when she was a precocious 11-year-old.

She went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School (a precursor to the Victorian College of the Arts) and travelled to Europe on an art scholarship in the late 50s.

It was a formative experience for Dawson, who studied art in London and spent six months in an Italian village, a popular destination for artists at the time, where she first experimented with abstraction.

Inspired by the abstract expressionist art she encountered in her travels, she returned to Melbourne in 1960 and had her first solo exhibition there at Gallery A the following year.

The show featured abstract paintings, including Circle and black bar, 1961 and Cross to oval, 1960, recalling the work of American abstract painter Mark Rothko.

It was unlike anything Australian audiences had seen before.

Melbourne at the time was “a stronghold of figurative art” thanks to the influence of artists such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd.

In contrast, Mimmocchi says, Dawson’s paintings were “wildly inventive and very beautiful … pulsating shapes of colour”.

“[They offered] a new way of seeing.”

While her work confounded some critics, her first Sydney show, held in 1964, was warmly received.

She moved to Sydney two years later, drawn to the city by its progressive art scene and unique light, and continued to create non-objective art.

“[During this period] you can see the painter who is starting to gain confidence in her vision and her work as well,” Mimmocchi says.

In 1968, two of Dawson’s paintings — Rollascape 2 and Wall II — appeared in The Field, a landmark exhibition of abstract art held at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. She was one of just three women among the 40 artists featured in the show.

“These works … were a symbol of the new world of the 1960s; they carry all that exuberance, enthusiasm, excitement and energy,” Mimmocchi says.

“It’s art that is signalling the hand of the artist, the mind of the artist, but also the time and place in which they are painted.”

A close connection to nature

Dawson met Boddy while designing sets for the Emerald Hill Theatre in South Melbourne, and they married in 1968.

While their move to the country in the early 70s might have surprised some, for Dawson, it was a return to the rural life she had known as a child growing up on a farm in western NSW.

Living in rural NSW, she became once again attuned to the waxing and waning of the seasons, and the strong connection she had always felt with nature found new expression in her work.

“She got to a point with her art in the late 1960s, early 70s, where she wanted to tie her language of abstraction closer to those sensations of the natural world,” Mimmocchi says.

“By the 2000s, when she’s living in Binalong and deeply engaged with her country surrounds, she’s starting to use what she sees as subjects for her art as well: the clouds, the moon, but also details of her everyday.”

Dawson and Boddy were keen gardeners, even publishing an organic gardening newsletter, and produce from their harvest also featured in Dawson’s paintings.

Her time as a production assistant at the Australian Museum in the late 60s, producing scientific illustrations of items in the institution’s collection, also shaped the work she created on the farm.

“Janet Dawson has an intensely curious mind,” Mimmocchi says.

“She is an artist who is looking around her and constantly questioning both in a scientific way and an artistic way. The two very closely combine in her work; she sees the majesty and the sublimeness of the things around her, as well as the scientific curiosity.”

An overdue retrospective

The AGNSW exhibition unfolds across four rooms, each presenting a different period of Dawson’s career.

Some have observed to Mimmocchi that each room could belong to a different artist.

“[It shows] she’s always rethinking, re-examining and reinterpreting her work,” Mimmocchi says.

Uniting Dawson’s work, from her foray into non-objective art in the 60s to recent paintings like Bellarine dusk, 2016–2018 — is “a great sense of energy”.

“There is an enduring thread … [which is] her curiosity and her engagement with the sensations of the world she’s trying to describe or evoke in her work, whether that be an abstract colour painting or a small still life of a sprouting onion,” Mimmocchi says.

The curator acknowledges a survey of Dawson’s work is long overdue.

“It should have been done years ago, but it’s wonderful to be at this point now,” she says.

Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until January 18, 2026.