Eleanor Hart | artist
 [1946 -  ]

In a career spanning more than five decades of creative practice, Eleanor Hart has developed a national profile as a highly accomplished and respected Australian artist. She is known for her unique vision and a sophisticated visual vocabulary grounded in abstract expressionism. Fluid across diverse mediums including painting, drawing and printmaking, Hart’s work unfolds before the viewer, a marvellous exploration of colour, expressive brushwork, shape, movement, space, form and light.

Hart emerged as an artist in Melbourne in the late 1970s after graduating from the RMIT in 1975, amongst a generation of artists exploring different forms of abstraction. Early in her career, a solo exhibition of prints and drawings at Realities Galleries, Melbourne in 1981 raised Hart’s profile and over the following decades, Hart forged a journey into the realms of abstraction with many solo and group exhibitions, international residences and representation in major public museum collections including the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia.

Informed by her Jewish and Viennese heritage, and experience growing up in post-war Melbourne as a first-generation migrant during the 1950s, Hart’s practice addresses themes around place and memory, dislocation, migration, and displacement. The works are meditations on personal experience, and family history, embedded with layers of history and movement through time and place, where abstract fragmented forms or fields of colour rhythmically flow across the surface of the canvas. As Art Critic Ashley Crawford noted “they continue to move in the memory, swirling, tidal, windblown, forever shifting. Restless, wilful and beautiful”[1]

The exhibition Unfolding Time staged at Glen Eira City Council Gallery in 2017, explored the discovery of hidden family letters written in Gothic German and addressed Hart’s families escape from Vienna during the Second World War. Hart donated the letters to the National Library of Australia collection in memory of her parents in 2018.  This compelling exhibition signified a continued intensity, vigour and resolution in the conception and execution of her work.
Hart has made an important contribution to Australian art, and over many decades has refined her approach to abstraction. Invested with a deeply personal and spiritual life, the experience of displacement, loss, hidden words and memories, her work provides rich territory for exploration and contemplation. Memory, history, and authenticity are integral to Eleanor Hart’s art practice and her life experience.
Diane Soumilas

[1]    Dr.Ashley Crawford, essay for exhibition catalogue Eleanor Hart: Unfolding Time, Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne, 2018, p.6.