Dick Watkins: love of women | Agapitos/Wilson Annual

Dick Watkins, Untitled (detail), 1996 – 1998, acrylic on canvas, 121 x 91.5 cm

Dick Watkins: love of women is an exhibition is made up of sketched paintings painted and amassed by the artist purely for himself and not to be exhibited publically.

Watkins is acknowledged as one of Australia’s great abstract artists and since the early 1960’s has exhibited extensively both commercially and publically as well as representing Australia at the Biennal de Sao Paulo in 1985. Often described as an artist’s artist Watkins has made art in a variety of modes and genres all the while singing in the voice of abstraction. This has included hard-edge, geometric, colour field and gestural abstraction, action or drip painting, and an occasional figurative as well as abstract and semi-abstract chord. And, in this exhibition Watkins presents the female nude, abstracted and far removed from a realistic or provocative likeness.