Lovers

Details

Artist

Joy Hester

Title

Lovers

Medium

gouache, pastel, ink on paper

Size

28 x 16 cm

Details

© Joy Hester/Licensed by Viscopy, 2016

Stock Number

214024

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Provenance

Barry Taffs, Sydney
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1999
Sandra Powell and Andrew King, Melbourne, 2014
The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell and Andrew King, Mossgreen, 19 March 2014, lot 19
private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Annual Collectors' Exhibition 1999, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 5 June - 3 July 1999, cat. no. 77
Leave No Space for Yearning: The Art of Joy Hester, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 25 August - 10 November 2001 (as Love c.1949)

Further Information

In Lovers, Hester strives to encapsulate the sheer bliss of a passionate embrace, and a latent hunger to literally infuse bodies with one's beloved. What should be a single face is split diagonally down the centre into two, a motif borrowed from Picasso, But by probing the "inner" layers of her figures Hester puts this device to uses that no other artist had attempted. The split or double face has become a symbol for a pair of lovers pressing tightly against each other. Completely oblivious to everything other than each other, the line of the lover's hair, their lips, even their eyes have apparently locked together into one visual entity.  Hester's composition testifies to her acute artistic sensitiveness and invention, so much being conveyed by the simplest of means, such as the nervously emotive spindly ink lines and the softly romanticised azure wash surrounding her embracing figures.                           

Christopher Heathcote, 1999