Hazel Dooney, born in 1978, is a woman who managed to gain recognition in the contemporary art world despite being both a female and a person under the age of 30. Her works are a hybrid of painting, collage, photography, video and sculpture techniques.
Dooney’s artworks are her observations of life, she deals with the issues involving the relationship that women have with the media, entertainment and advertising. Her characters featured in her works are constantly re-rendered and re-defined, parodying on old sexist clichés. These characters are displaying a confident attitude and display an acceptance of their form and their own sexuality. Dooney’s paintings use large blocks of colours and bold outlines and are in high gloss enamel to create an image that will give “an illusion of perfection“.
She studied fine arts at the Queensland University of Technology for 6 months before dropping out. In 2005, Dooney took the initiative to break away from all her gallery partnerships in order to represent herself as an artist. Through this, Dooney has now been acknowledged to be one of the first artists be able to take a step outside the traditional, commercial and institutional gallery system, to manage her own art career using the web’s self-publishing and social networking tools as a medium.
In 2001, at the age of 22, Hazel was the only female artist invited to join nine other artists, including John Olsen, Tim Storrier, David Larwill and Robert Jacks on an art expedition to central Australia. The journey was later created into a televison documentary, The View From Here, directed by Liz Jones.
In December, 2007, Dooney was the only female artist under 30 with works included in the auction, Modern and Contemporary Australian Art, held at Christie’s in London. The auction also featured works by Brett Whitely, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and Tracey Moffat.
In the same year, Dooney was featured in an issue of Vogue Australia, as a pictorial article entitled Australia’s Most Wanted. She was also acknowledged in a full-page profile in the Australian Financial Review.
She held her first photography exhibition titled PORNO, at Melbourne’s MARS Gallery, in 2008. It drew one of the largest crowds ever for an opening at a commercial gallery in Melbourne. Critics, collectors and viewers were clearly discomforted by the artist’s participation in some of the sexually explicit images.
That year, Hazel Dooney’s enamel painting, Drowned Ophelia, was sold in Sydney, at Deutscher-Menzies' auction of contemporary art, for over $A13,000.
Less than a week later, Dooney’s painting, Dangerous Career Babe: The Aviatrix, was sold for $A32,701 at Christie’s sale of Modern And Contemporary Australian And South African Art in London.
In 2011, the Australian Art Auction Record listed Hazel Dooney in the top 50 most traded artists by value across Australian and New Zealand at no. 41.
In the same year, she was one of an international board of advisers for the Charlatan Ink Art Prize, despite (or, perhaps, because of) her ongoing criticism of the idea of competition in art. She was also featured as one of four 'Empowered’ young celebrities featured on the cover of the US magazine, Obvious. In her introduction to the accompanying interview, the writer Nancy Southwick observed, “Her provocative work has captured the attention of many of the trendsetters of our time. The subject matter is intensely sexual yet it evokes a kind of girlie openness that is refreshing. Nothing about her work or her nature is compromised. The work is pivotal and it strikes a chord within the viewer and makes them succumb to an inner dialogue with themselves.”
In 2012, examples of her work were included in a major exhibition, Controversy: The Power of Art
, at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Curated by Dr Vivien Gaston, it explored “the social and cultural impact of art through examples that have provoked intense response and controversy”.
In 2013, after nearly two years of relative inactivity caused by mental illness, Hazel Dooney unveiled her largest work to date, a monochromatic mural titled Ten Dicta For Young Women Who Are Artists. Spanning half a city block in Melbourne, Australia, it was commissioned by Robert Doyle, the Right Honourable Lord Mayor of Melbourne, and was Dooney’s first public work. It also marked Dooney’s abrupt move away from figurative painting and ‘her’ medium of enamel to text-based, polemical 'interventions’ inspired by a long, innovative engagement with social media.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2014
- Last updated:
- 2014
