Lot 115

Private collection, Adelaide

RELATED WORK:
Dora Chapman, Fish Girl c.1970, synthetic polymer paint on board, 28 x 38cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Dora Chapman was a significant South Australian artist and educator whose achievement in screenprinting deserves renewed recognition. Trained at the South Australian School of Art, she first excelled in portraiture and landscape before adopting a modernist vocabulary. After her marriage in 1944 to fellow artist James Cant, she often placed his career ahead of her own, a circumstance that contributed to her later under recognition.

It was during the 1970s that Chapman created her most distinctive body of work. Turning to hard-edge abstraction and screenprinting, she developed a clear independent voice, producing images full of colour and design. The precision required by screenprinting suited her disciplined approach, resulting in works that stood apart from both her earlier realism and Cant's style.

Examples of her work from this period, including the Head series, are represented in the Art Gallery of South Australia and other national collections. They affirm Chapman's place as a significant figure in twentieth-century Australian art - an artist long overshadowed by her husband, yet whose artworks stand as important contributions in their own right.

Hannah Ryan
Senior Art Specialist

© Dora Chapman/Copyright Agency, 2025