Vicki Varvaressos is one of the generation of women artists enabled by feminism in the 1970s. After a comfortable childhood in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill, she first attended the University of Sydney but soon decided on a career in art and in 1970 enrolled in an art diploma. The National Art School at Darlinghurst physically close to her childhood home, but she was surprised at the poverty she found in inner Sydney.
She became an urban activist, painting posters to oppose the destruction of the old houses for high rise development.
At the age of 22 she married Paul Redding, a reluctant medical student. She encouraged him to change direction, to follow his passion.He left medicine to study philosophy, which until he obtained tenure was a career of some uncertainty. The couple spent some time in Paris when Paul undertook his postgraduate research, living “as students” with little money
At art school she realised that most of the teachers assumed that the female students were less than serious about their careers. The exception was Peter Blayney, who paid all students the compliment of assuming they were professional.
After completing her diploma she undertook a variety of menial jobs, including repacking goods for “Miser Jones”, a subsidiary of David Jones’ department store. This ended when she became the studio assistant for weaver Margaret Grafton, a fellow member of the Darlinghurst Residents Action Group.
Her first work was exhibited at a group exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1975. She held her first solo exhibition at Watters in July 1976, an event that coincided with the murder of Juanita Nielsen, who she knew from her political activism. She continued to exhibit at Watters until the gallery closed in 2018.
Her early work had drawn on satirical images of social, consumerist critique. Later her figures became more personal, showing a softer intimacy. In the late 1980s she began to feel the lure of abstraction and since then has veered between the figure and abstract forms.
In 2002 she was awarded the Portia Geach Portrait prize for “Self portrait with painting”, which linked both her figurative work and her abstract.
Varvaressos has been honoured with two retrospective survey exhibitions, at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery in 2014 and at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in 2018.
- Writers:
-
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 2011
- Last updated:
- 2019
