Janet Dawson: Faraway, So Close

Celebrates the work of an artist who is a trailblazer of abstraction yet has a distinct realist style

Born in Sydney in 1935, Janet Dawson has moved between abstraction and figuration, formalism and realism over six decades. Consistent to her practice is 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 new scholarship by exhibition curator Denise Mimmocchi and assistant curator Monique Leslie Watson (both Art Gallery of New South Wales) and by Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie. An archival text by British-born Australian art critic Virginia Spate on Dawson’s first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Melbourne, in 1961, is also reproduced.

Published in association with a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Faraway, So Close features over eighty works created from 1951 to 2018, as well as archival and recent photographs.

Exhibition Dates:

July 19, 2025-January 18, 2026

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Denise Mimmocchi is 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 Museum of Modern Art/AGNSW, 2016). Contributors: Jennifer Higgie, Monique Leslie Watkins, and Virginia Spate