Lesley Dumbrell b. 1941

  • Artist (Painter)
Throughout her sustained career Lesley Dumbrell’s painting has been characterised by precise, geometric abstraction. In 1974, at a time when women artists found it difficult to be taken seriously, she was a participant in the ground breaking exhibiiton, A Room of One’s Own, and also founded the Women’s Arr Register.
Tags: Abstract art, Feminism, geometric abstraction, Colour field painting

Melbourne born Lesley Dumbrell studied painting at RMIT from 1959 to 1962. As with other young artists of her generation she became entranced with the possibilities of hard edged geometric abstraction and the relationship of colour and line to imply form. One significant influence on her early work was the British artist Bridget Riley. In the 1960s women artists were not so well known.
Gender was certainly a factor in her work being overlooked by John Stringer and Brian Finemore when they looked for young abstract painters to define younger generation artists in The Field in 1968.
However she did attract the attention of Bronwyn Thomas and in 1969 held her first solo exhibition at Sydney’s prestigious Bonython Galleries. This was followed the next year by an exhibition at Strines in Melbourne and in 1973 at the prestigious Powell Street Gallery. She recently noted that no works sold from these three exhibitions.
In 1974 she became one of the founders of the Women’s Art Movement, which was based around the Ewing and Paton Galleries at the University of Melbourne. With Ann Newmarch and Julie Irving she exhibited in A Room of One’s Own, which highlighted the position of emerging women artists. She also became a founding member of the Lip collective.
In 1977 she became artist in residence at Monash University which also held a survey exhibition of her recent work. She taught intermittently at the Victorian College of the Arts between 1980 and 1985, and also travelled to Italy and France on a Visual Arts Board Grant from the Australia Council.
In 1981 some of her art was selected for a Works on Paper, exhibition at Cunningham-Ward Gallery in New York. She returned to Australia, stimulated by what she had seen. “I began to explore shapes that could link together, and exist in an imagined space,” she wrote.
In 1990 she moved to Bangkok, and her style absorbed the influences of her new environment, enjoying the use of line and grid to create optical illusion. These works were exhibited in Shades of Light the 1999 survey exhibition of her work at the Ian Potter Art Museum, University of Melbourne.
In 2002 she returned to Australia, to the Strathbogie Ranges, north of Melbourne and has since divided her time between Australia and Thailand. In 2020 she described some of her work as having a “more sculptural feel”. Later that year her blog recorded that she was experimenting in turning drawings into sculptures.

Writers:

Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022