Barbara HANRAHAN Australia, 1939–1991 The dog will come ... 1962, Adelaide linocut, hand-coloured with coloured inks on paper 42.5 x 47.0 cm (image, irreg.) 47.0 x 54.0 cm (sheet) Gift of Barbara Hanrahan 1990 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Courtesy J.P Steele

The Divided Self:  The Prints of
Barbara Hanrahan

Carrick Hill
5 April - 30 June 2007

Curated by Maria Zagala, Associate Curator, Prints, Drawings, Photographs
Art Gallery of South Australia

Barbara Hanrahan created a distinct and powerful body of work during her career, which spanned from the 1960s until her death in 1991. Trained as a printmaker in Adelaide and London, she lived between the two cities for much of her adult life. Both of these places exerted profound influence on her work; Hanrahan drew on the experiences of her childhood in Adelaide for much of her imagery, while the social upheavals of London in the 1960s, and artistic influences of the British Pop artists, formed her stylistic development. Using the expressive possibilities of the printmaking medium, she explored with an unflinching directness some of the most complex facets of female experience. Hanrahan’s prints delve into the fraught nature of intimate relationships between women; men and women; and women’s relationships with their own bodies. Returning to and re-working images created over several decades, Hanrahan treated these themes with a mixture of rawness and humour.

This exhibition, of over 50 prints by Barbara Hanrahan from the Art Gallery of South Australia collection, traces her development as an artist. It includes some of her earliest prints made while a student at South Australian School of Art, the Pop inspired works of the 1960s and 1970s, and the tour de force linocuts of the 1980s.

The divided self: the prints of Barbara Harahan from the Art Gallery of South Australia collection