Lot 1

The painting is in overall good and stable condition. Upon close inspection, there is a minor fly spot upper centre, and light surface marks to the far corners. In the lower centre there appears to be some foreign matter against the surface, likely from coming in contact with another object. The work is housed in its original metal frame, overall size 183.5 x 244cm.


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The National Australia Bank Art Collection

RELATED WORK:
Snakes and Ladders 1979, tapestry, 181 x 235cm

Lesley Dumbrell was a pioneer of geometric abstraction in Australia and remains one of our most renowned abstract artists. Her initial years of training at RMIT in Melbourne were filled with the conformist views and figurative training that was commom amongst the academia of the time, but Dumbrell's curiosity sparked elsewhere.
In the immediate years after she graduated at RMIT, Dumbrell's creative output was quiet. It wasn't until 1966 when a teaching job at the Prahran College of Advanced Education ignited her passion for abstraction. Her peers included some of the most recognised abstract artists including Alan Leach-Jones, who also embraced an abstract aesthetic, and Jim Doolin who introduced Dumbrell to Liquitex, the paint that would become synonymous with her work. Her years at Prahran provided more artistic inspiration and encouragement than her formal education, with many students exploring the principles of colour-field painting. The art world would soon catch on, with 1968 bringing forth the ground-breaking exhibition, The Field, at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Solo shows for Lesley soon ensued and her career as an abstract artist began to accelerate. Furthermore, her associations with others in the art world encouraged her feminist perspective to take hold, and led to her critical involvement in the Women's Art Register, of which she was a founding member in 1975. A meeting between Kiffy Rubbo, Meredith Rogers, Erica McGilchrist, and Lesley Dumbrell led to a discussion on the need for an archive of local women's art. The Women's Art Forum was developed as a platform, and today the Women's Art Register continues to showcase the voices and talents of women artists in Australia.
At this stage, her artworks had taken on a linear approach to Op Art, where increasingly thinner lines were placed in a seemingly spontaneous design across the canvas. In fact, Lesley undertakes a meticulous planning process with preparatory studies to ensure the composition is at its most striking. Her admiration of an international abstract style, à la Bridget Riley, was starkly different to many of her female counterparts.
"I'll start with a pencil and a ruler and I'll start working out some kind of repeated element or system. I'll end up with a drawing. I can't really explain what the mesh is between the line or the linear structure and the colour because, you know, they don't come simultaneously. I used to say that the linear structure was just a way of hanging colour across a painting, if you like."
(Lesley Dumbrell, in an interview with James Gleeson, 1979)
In 1979, Lesley Dumbrell was one of three artists (Jeff Makin and Jan Senbergs the other two) first commissioned to create a tapestry with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop to be acquired by the National Australia Bank. Lesley's sister, Merrill, was a key figure at the workshop and so Lesley was already a regular visitor, intrigued by the medium and how she could translate her own meticulous geometric designs into a weave. In order to keep this process as inherent to her usual ways of working as possible, Lesley first prepared the painting of "Snakes and Ladders".
"Snakes and Ladders" is a premium example of the linear abstraction that Lesley had mastered throughout the late 1970s and into the very early 80s. It's smooth surface is meticulous, with thin strips of coloured lines intersecting and overlapping with kaleidoscopic complexity. Many of Lesley's paintings explore elements of movement - something not often associated with geometric abstraction. Many of her artwork titles address this specifically, and in this case we imagine the unpredictable movement associated with the children's game, existing within Lesley's own grid or framework. In the game of Snakes and Ladders, the die instills an element of chance. It's historic roots are based around morality, reflecting life's journey of virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes). In Lesley's painting, we see the small short and evenly spaced lines ascending the work, akin to the ladder, before being quickly intercepted by long diagonals and lightning shapes that bring us back down.
In the four decades since "Snakes and Ladders" was first painted, Lesley Dumbrell has traversed the opportunities and challenges of the Australian art world. As one of our foremost female abstractionists, the industry's appreciation for her innovative painterly style is still catching up. With the recent buzz around Australian Women Artists, Lesley's contributions to Australian Abstraction are now finally reaching appropriate heights.

Olivia Fuller
Head of Art