From 21 March – 14 June 2020, Heide Museum of Modern Art will celebrate the centenary of Australian modernist artist Joy Hester (1920-1960) with a major survey of her distinctive oeuvre. Joy Hester: Remember Me is the first solo exhibition of Hester’s art in almost twenty years and brings together more than 130 significant works from public and private collections, including seldom-seen impromptu studies that shed light on Hester’s unique style and creative process.

Acknowledged today as one of Australia’s most original and compelling artists of her generation, Joy Hester worked almost exclusively in brush and ink, focusing on the expressive potential of the figure and face as metaphors for the human condition. Unconventional and courageous, she freed herself from orthodox methods and brought a powerful female sensibility to subjects considered provocative during her life time such as love, sex, birth, and death.

This long-overdue survey traces Hester’s artistic trajectory from early naturalistic student drawings to her psychological portraits, her powerful responses to the oppressive climate of war, and later investigations into human intimacy and the theme of childhood. Joy Hester: Remember Me includes a number of Hester’s defining series—the Incredible Night Dreams, Faces, Lovers, and Girls—and reveals her experimentation with remarkably diverse stylistic modes as she found her own voice, using drawing as a vehicle to represent life in all its complexity.

Image: Joy Hester, Untitled (From the Love series) 1949