Lesley Dumbrell
Lesley Dumbrell is one of Australia’s most significant and respected abstract painters.
Born in Melbourne in 1941, Dumbrell attended art school at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in the early 1960s, a time when the school discouraged exploration of abstraction. She embarked on her own inquiry into abstract form, studying reproductions of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich and reading Vasily Kandinsky’s seminal 1911 publication Concerning the spiritual in art.
Teaching art at the Prahran College of Advanced Education in the late 1960s, Dumbrell found encouragement in the company of colleagues who shared an enthusiasm for abstraction. A full-time artist by 1968, she presented her first exhibition at Bonython Gallery in Paddington, Sydney in 1969, which included the large-scale painting Red shift 1969, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection.
Dumbrell’s career evolved in the 1970s alongside a re-energised feminist art movement, encouraged by a 1975 Australian visit from American art critic and feminist activist Lucy Lippard, who urged Melbourne’s women artists to galvanise and forge community with one another. Lippard inspired Dumbrell and her contemporaries Erica McGilchrist, Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers to create the Women’s Art Register, a living archive of women’s art practice in Australia and a networking, education and advocacy body, which still operates today.
In 1991 Dumbrell moved to Bangkok, where she distilled the influence of south-east Asia in her richly coloured paintings of the late 1990s. Today she maintains her home and studio in Bangkok alongside one in the Strathbogie Ranges in regional Victoria.
Dumbrell continues to explore the infinite possibilities of colour and the grid structure, with recent work extending into water-jet-cut metal sculpture.
solo exhibitions
group exhibitions