Contemporary Australia: Women

77 Marie Hagerty Australia b.1964 coupling II 2012 Acrylic and oil paint on canvas 200 x 180cm Marie Hagerty’s paintings play on the viewer’s tendency to anthropomorphise abstract compositions. The centrepiece for her works — the triptych deposition 2011–12 — references Descent from the Cross c.1435 by Rogier van der Weyden, in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. In this work, Weyden has created a shallow depth of field by clustering the almost life-size figures in the foreground. Deposition also has a shallow depth of field, created not through composition but through Hagerty’s application of paint. She uses both oil and synthetic polymer paint, confessing not to have the patience for pure oils. 1 The works are quite flat but there are small moments of surprising depth, built into the images through shadowing. These are not representational of a light source but rather used as a compositional element. Hagerty also creates tension between very smoothly painted surfaces and rougher areas where traces of the brush marks are left on the canvas. At the centre of Descent from the Cross , the limp Christ and Mary lie diagonally across the canvas. Christ is pictured in the arms of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, after having been taken down from the cross. His flesh is pale, indicating that the blood of life has drained from his body. This is one of the first major works to put Mary ‘suffering with’ Jesus at the centre of a composition. 2 To accentuate this, van der Weyden painted Mary in lapis lazuli-blue robes, fainting into the arms of Saint John and a holy woman — reminding the viewer that, like Mary, Jesus will also rise again. Hagerty hints at this classical composition with the white (Jesus) and black (Mary) sections at the centre of her work, though here it seems that Jesus and Mary are already rising. Another reference to Descent from the Cross can be found in the knees protruding from the canvas, replicating the knees of Saint John and Mary Magdalene who stand at either end of van der Wyden’s painting acting as brackets to Mary and Jesus. The angles of the knees in both paintings work to move the viewer’s eye around the canvas. In deposition , two melded forms hang in a shallow field of colour, perhaps in some kind of purgatory. The depiction of figures in spatial limbo is often seen in the work of Francis Bacon; Hagerty’s deposition was partially inspired by Bacon’s Triptych 1970 in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The figures in Bacon’s painting waiver between fleshy bodies and abstract blurs of colour and the couple at its centre are so entangled that it is unclear what limbs belong to which figure. Bacon spoke of the difficulties of not falling completely into abstraction when creating an image during an interview with David Sylvester: the other day I painted a head of somebody, and what made the sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint . . . Then the next day I tried to take it further and tried to make it more poignant, more near, and I lost the image completely. Because this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction. It will go right out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do with it. It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up on to the nervous system more violently and more poignantly. 3 Hagerty, too, is constantly shifting between the abstract and the figurative in her work. She takes to the canvas without an end in mind and speaks of the development of the work as if it is an apparition evolving before her eyes — figures or forms emerging and, at times, also meld into one another. 4 This conflation of the figurative and the abstract is reiterated through her interest in the Kama Sutra, where bodies become so entwined that they become abstract compositions. In these illustrations the difference between self and the other, and positive and negative space, collapses. Moreover, the amorphous figures in deposition are suspended from ropes, an explicit reference to Triptych . Bacon originally took the ropes from a set of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge in which a woman gets in and out of a hammock. 5 His figures look more like they Marie Hagerty Marie Hagerty Painting both at once