Dale Hickey is represented in almost every Australian collection worth being in, and has featured in dozens of group shows over almost fifty years, including ‘The Field’ (1968), ‘A Melbourne Mood’ (1983) and ‘Fieldwork’ (2002). What is annoying, however, is that this is the first solo survey of his work in a public gallery in twenty years. These are pictures that are all the better for being seen together, and the organisers should be congratulated for the undertaking. This small survey exhibition confirms Hickey as an artist of the highest calibre, who surely stands among Australia’s greatest painters.
It is easy to admire the smooth graphic quality of Hickey’s works in reproduction, but in the flesh they remain a revelation. Like the experience of first seeing a real Mondrian, they are revealed with all sorts of complexities. Overpainting never quite hides altered colours, the variations between oil and enamel give Hickey’s seemingly bland surfaces a pulsating tension and his bold flat blocks of colour are revealed, up close, to be more contingent, less certain. In short, they invite close and patient viewing. Looking at these pictures is like playing chess with the artist. Perspective flips flops, objects threaten to topple and roll off raking surfaces that should be flat, windows become crucifix paintings and vice versa, colours ‘push and pull’ until they hurt. It’s like Broadway Boogie Woogie powered by a V8.
The shifts between depth and flatness are especially well controlled in Untitled (1986) (catalogue 21). Two grey easels with white stretched canvases present variously—one faces the viewer as a white square, the other is only visible as a slim diagonal white zip, its schematic staples describing its