Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson explores the longstanding creative partnership and artistic synergies between these two pioneering abstract artists. Comprising more than seventy-five paintings and works on paper, the exhibition charts their radical leap into pure abstraction and the important role they played in shaping the modern art movement in Australia.

Highlights include Crowley’s semi-abstract Portrait, 1939, which anticipates pure abstraction in its total rejection of traditional modes of rendering realistic form and space; and a selection of Balson’s ‘Constructive paintings’, geometric abstractions that featured intersecting planes of colour.

Ralph Balson, Constructive painting, 1941, oil on cardboard, 71.4 × 56.2cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Bequest of Grace Crowley, 1981. © Ralph Balson Estate. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
23 May to 22 September 2024
Melbourne

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