Janet Dawson: Faraway, So Close

(Hardback)

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Janet Dawson: Faraway, so close celebrates the work of Janet Dawson, a pioneer of abstraction and an artist with a distinct realist style. Born in Sydney in 1935, Dawson has moved between abstraction and figuration, formalism and realism over seven decades. Consistent to her practiceis her investigative vision: her art derives from an immense curiosity about material existence and states of the natural world.

The first major monograph on Dawson, this book features an essay by the curator Denise Mimmocchi, as well as new scholarship by Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie and assistant curator Monique Leslie Watkins. A selection of archival texts and images intersperse the book, including an essay by Australian art historian Virginia Spate on Dawson's first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Sydney, in 1961.

Published in association with a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Faraway, so close features over 80 artworks from 1951 to 2018, as well as archival and recent photographs.

Author Bio

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. She is the inaugural editor of the National Gallery of Australia's publication The annual (2024) and the host of the gallery's new podcast Artists' artists. Previously, Higgie was the editor of frieze magazine and the presenter of Bow down, a podcast about women in art history. Her recent books include The other side: a story of women, art and the spirit world (2023) and The mirror and the palette: rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women's self-portraits (2021). Her novel Bedlam will be re-released by Verso in 2025.

Denise Mimmocchiis senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her recent exhibitions and publications include Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2021), Tuckson: The Abstract Sublime (AGNSW, 2018) and O'Keeffe, Cossington Smith, Preston: Making Modernism (co-curator, Heide MoMA/AGNSW, 2016).

Virginia Spate (England/Australia 1937-2022) was a distinguished art historian, and a friend and early supporter of Janet Dawson's work. From 1978 to 2004, Spate was Power Professor of Fine Art and director of the Power Institute, University of Sydney. Known for her wide-ranging scholarship, her acclaimed publications include Orphism(1979), ClaudeMonet: the colour of time(1992), which won the prestigious Mitchell Prize, and monographs on Tom Roberts (1985) and John Olsen (1963). Spate was awarded a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 by the French Government, a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2018, and elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1981. She was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1998 to 1999.

Monique Leslie Watkins is assistant curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She is the former deputy editor of, and a regular contributor to, the Art Gallery's Look magazine, and her writing was recently published in Dangerously modern: Australian women artists in Europe 1890-1940 (2025). She is also the curator of a forthcoming exhibition at theArt Gallery featuring a commissioned work by Raquel Caballero.