Dale Hickey
& Paul Boston:
Niagara Galleries
Niagara Galleries presents its first exhibition with renowned Australian artist Dale Hickey, whose work was included in The Field, the seminal 1968 inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Southbank site, which showcased Australian paintings, sculpture and conceptual works. This will also be Hickey’s first solo exhibition since 2010; a large-scale retrospective of his work was held at Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in 1988. More recently, in 2008, the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne presented Dale Hickey: Life in a Box, which brought together 36 key works from the artist’s 40-year career. (A fascinating resource for Hickey is the James Gleeson Oral History Collection, available through the National Gallery of Australia website, in which the late James Gleeson interviewed Australia’s major artists. A conversation between Gleeson and Hickey from 1971 is available to download.) Hickey will show at Niagara alongside Paul Boston, Hickey’s former student. Boston’s abstract works are evidence of the artist’s musing on the question of ‘being’, the contemplative and the active. His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales and in private collections in Australia and overseas. The two exhibitions, which variously investigate abstract painting, shows concurrently until March 2 at Niagara Galleries.
