Survey
The art of Davida Allen is, and always has been, excruciatingly self-referential. The content of this private/public image-making, however, is in danger of becoming more suggestive of rhetorical repetition than deeply felt experience. This is the strongest impression delivered by the survey exhibition of the artist’s work recently mounted by Brisbane’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Surprisingly, the most satisfying and lively works within this fifteen year sweep were not the heavily worked and somehow too familiar canvases but the small, crucial moments of change and experimentation reflected in the mixed media series included in the show. Selected works from I Don’t Want To Go Mad (1981), Death of my Father (1983), and Fantasy With A Truck (1986), proved freer than the large scale images, and displayed a whimsical, and in a sense more accessible, intimacy and honesty. These drawings form a link with an earlier trend in Davida's work, the small collages and assemblages from her post-art school days in the early seventies. Though the subject matter - Catholic, sexual and domestic identity - remains static throughout Davida Allens' career, works from that early period such as I'm No Child (1973) and Our House (1973) possess a freedom from calculation that is no longer apparent within the gestural signature style of her paintings. The development from the still impressive "breakthrough" Figure paintings of 1979 to the latest Hinchinbrook Holiday series is a matter of peripheral, elemental introductions, such as text and landscape, to a fundamentally unchanging field.
Perhaps the impression of stock-pile imagery was exacerbated by the public profiling of the artist for this exhibition. During the press preview Davida, complete with paint splattered hands, proved feisty, articulate, and largely
Davida Allen, Mother and Child, 1983. Collection: Ray and Annette Hughes.
