Lot 88

Private collection, Melbourne

Although Erica was multi-faceted as a painter, illustrator, dancer, teacher, and political activist she is still considered one of Australia's lesser known female modernists.

Erica worked at the Kew Mental Hospital throughout the 1950's where she taught art therapy. The artist comments, "there was rich material indeed, of a heart-breaking kind. Kew Hospital was a prison where patients who had been classified as `incurable' were collected, waiting for death to release them. A series of works on what I saw and experienced at Kew was inevitable."

In later years, the advent of feminism and the women's art movement had a profound effect on McGilchrist. In 1975, Erica and Lucy Lippard amongst others established the Women's Art Register, aimed at forwarding the feminist movement in the arts.

More recently, in 2015 Erica McGilchrist's Estate was bequethed to the Heide Museum of Modern Art to further fund exhibitions of work by women artists.