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 2013, 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 Mayor of Melbourne. This was Dooney’s first public work. It also marked Dooney’s move away from figurative painting to more text-based work.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2014
- Last updated:
- 2014
