Book Launch: Dick Watkins: Reshaping Art and Life

Join author Mary Eagle in conversation with Quentin Sprague and Tony Oates for the launch of Dick Watkins: Reshaping Art and Life.

Dick Watkins belongs to the generation of artists whose careers were launched at the high-flying end of American-based Abstraction, becoming a central figure in Australian modernist art in the sixties. Art historian, Dr Mary Eagle, uncovers many untold aspects of his career informed by a close working relationship with the artist.

Dick Watkins belongs to the generation of artists whose careers were launched at the high-flying end of American-based Abstraction. Almost immediately he faced up to the abrupt end of the Modern era. Culture was no longer to be framed by ‘progress’. In 1970, taking stock of the situation, he announced that he was a copyist, there being no such thing as a new creation in art, shaped as it was by visual languages. Nor did he intend to limit his curiosity about the relation of art to life by restricting himself to a ‘personal’ style. There followed a long and passionately adventurous exploration into many subjects and styles, during which Watkins was often the first to signal changes taking place in Western culture. The result is that for half a century he has been a major, if controversial figure in Australian art.

Published by ANU Press

Mary Eagle is the author of a number of books about Australian art. Born in 1944, her BA degree was in History as well as Fine Arts and her PhD thesis was a history based on situations represented visually both by Indigenous Australians and European-Australians. Greg Dening’s ethnographic teaching at the University of Melbourne was the key for her approach to art criticism, art history, and curatorship. After eighteen years as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, seven as the Head of Australian Art, the same influence led her to join The Australian National University’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and Humanities Research Centre.

Quentin Sprague is a writer based on Australia’s south-east coast, on Wadawurrung country. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Monthly, The Australian, Art & Australia, and Discipline, and in artist monographs and exhibition catalogues published by (among others) the National Gallery of Victoria, the Monash University Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. His first book, The Stranger Artist, won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction.

Tony Oates is Director of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, where he was also  Exhibitions Curator for many years. He has a reputation for curating and co-curating energetic thematic exhibitions.

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