Hanna Kay b. 1947

Also known as Hanna Kowalski
  • Artist ,
  • Artist (Painter)
Painter Hanna Kay (b.1947 Tel Aviv, Israel) studied painting in Vienna, lived in New York for almost ten years and arrived in Australia in 1989. She paints, produces artist's books and teaches Hebrew at the University of Sydney.

Hanna Kowalski was born in Tel-Aviv in 1947, a little over a year before the new nation of Israel was formed in Palestine. At the end of the 1960’s she abbreviated Kowalski to Kay.

Born into a Jewish family, she was the eldest of two children of Jacob and Sarah. Both parents kept their history alive through storytelling, a mode of communication that Kay came to use as integral to her life and work.

It was in Tel Aviv in 1969/70 that Kay first exhibited her work in a group show with the Artists Association, followed by two solo exhibitions at the city’s New Gallery. Her illustrations for a poetry book led to the book being featured in the 1971 Frankfurt Book Fair, so Kay went to Frankfurt to sign copies. Whilst there she established contact with a gallery which not only exhibited her work, but made it possible for her to live in Germany for over a year. While in Germany, she worked, travelled and contributed to group exhibitions.

She then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, where she learned to paint in both tempera and oils under Anton Lemden and Ernest Fuchs. It was here that she met her first husband, De Es (Dieter) Schwertberger. In 1974 her daughter, Maya, was born and the family moved to New York where Kay and her husband established a studio in Soho. Kay participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in America, including exhibitions in Chicago and San Francisco. In 1979 Kay divorced and continued living in New York as a single mother, supplementing her income with textile designs. In 1984 she returned to Israel.

In 1986 Kay met her second husband, Leslie Wand, a videographer. Three years later the family moved to Sydney, Australia, where Kay quickly established her studio and links with the galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, contributing to a group show at BMG Fine Arts in Sydney in 1989 and holding a solo show at the same gallery the following year.

Over the next two decades she exhibited at Michael Nagy Gallery (1993, 1995, 1998, 2002) and Wilson St Gallery (2007, 2009) in Sydney; Luba Bilu Gallery (1994) and Span Galleries (2000, 2005) in Melbourne; Paul Greenaway Gallery (1992, 1994, 1996, 1999) in Adelaide; Beaver Galleries (1997) in Canberra. Her work was also exhibited in various regional galleries such as Moree Plains Regional Art Gallery (2006), New England Regional Art Gallery (2006), Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery (2004 and 2010), Maitland Regional Art Gallery (2010), Tamworth Regional Art Gallery (2009) and the Australian Jewish Museum (2010). In all, she contributed to seventeen group exhibitions and nineteen solo exhibitions during this period.

Committed though she was to her art production during the 1990s, she also enrolled in a Semiotics and Philosophy degree at the University of Sydney in 1996, gaining her Bachelor of Arts in 2000. In 1999 she began lecturing in Hebrew part-time at the same institution.

In 2000 Kay and Wand moved to the Hunter Valley, NSW. Here she began working from her studio 'Shed’. It was in this space in 2003 that Kay started writing a journal. This intensive activity of reflecting on her life led to the journal’s publication as Notes from the Shed: A Journal (Macmillan 2007).

Kay has won several awards including the People’s Choice award at the 2006 Norvill Art competition for Australian Landscape Painting and the main prize for same in 2008. In 2007, she won the Muswellbrook Open Art Prize.

Though many of Kay’s paintings are nature themed, she also paints figures, as seen in her 2003 painting Reclining, in which a naked woman lies on her side in the grass with her back to the audience. Nests, mud and water are recurring visual themes in Kay’s work. In the tryptich Dry -Wet – Muddy (oil and tempera on canvas) she realistically depicts nests, soils, and small twigs scattered from an abandoned nest.

Kay is a member of the not-for-profit organization Turning the Pages. This project, which highlights the plight of the Pages River, brings together artists and scientists from around the country to engage the local community in a series of workshops for both school children and adults in order to convey the significance of the River historically, culturally, and biologically. This on-going project has won several national awards such as the Local Government Cultural Award (2008) and the Tidy Towns Sustainable Communities Award (2009).

In her second book, Undertow (2010), Hanna Kay records and reflects on her thirty-four paintings inspired by the Maitland Jewish cemetery. Maitland Regional Art Gallery commissioned an exhibition of the same name to complement the historical installation Maitland Jewish cemetery: a monument to dreams and deeds (May-July 2010).

In 2010 Hanna Kay continued to lecture part time in Hebrew at the University of Sydney, to write, paint and exhibit her work.

Writers:
Green, Domonique
De Lorenzo, Catherine
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2010