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HELEN EAGER
Sydney-based painter Helen Eager was born in 1952. She studied in Adelaide
and Berkley, USA, and in 1980 was a recipient of an Australia Council grant to
travel and study in Europe, Great Britain and the United States. In 1988 she was
awarded the Australia Council's Greene Street residency in New York – an
intensive period where the large studio space and time to devote to her practice
had a significant impact on the scale of her work. In 1990 she graduated with an
MA in Visual Arts from the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. Helen Eager has been
exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1975 and is represented in many
state and regional art galleries across Australia, as well as in private and
corporate collections.
About the works
Known for her lithographic works in the 1970s, Helen Eager has since pursued
a painting practice that incorporates simplified forms and pure lyrical colour.
The early interior studies led to a particular focus on objects and more
recently, to abstract paintings that comprise geometric shapes and vibrant
colour relationships.
The early prints and pastel drawings in the Allens collection have a
preoccupation with light as well as a lightness of touch – expressive line
drawing and cross-hatching that bring objects and forms into being. The subject
matter concentrated on rooms and other interior spaces such as a sewing basket,
a cupboard, the comfort of an armchair – and, in this respect, these early
works seem more tentative and demure than the recent paintings which contrast
one strong colour against another, a geometric shape or angle against its
background or negative space. But the change of approach was not sudden: The Box
1986 can be considered a transitional work, a domestic interior yet already the
furniture and objects are depicted as darkened and ghost-like.
If the early works represent a concern with enclosed space – a world
encapsulated within homely objects – then by the late 1980s, Eager had not only
opened up her frame of reference in terms of the physical scale of her
paintings, she simultaneously began to zoom in on particular and minute details,
enlarging them so that they took on a more ominous presence. The edge of an
object, a lampshade for instance, now a simplified angle against a blank wall; a
cast shadow looms menacingly yet it is just a tea-cup or jug handle painted much
larger and sharper than life; blocks of colour, one in front of the other, hint
at an arrangement of furniture and fittings…these simple shapes and shadows
alluding to empty but memory-filled rooms such as those works the artist
exhibited under the collective title From an old house in America in 1990.
Helen Eager is one of the artists whose work has been acquired since the
beginning of the Allens collection. Increasingly, over the three decades
represented, it becomes apparent that the artist's fascination with light,
colour and scale is an on-going investigation – the bold colour contrasts that
characterise the most recent paintings (the series Angle 1998, On the Edge 2000,
and Precipice 2003) have their beginnings in the juxtaposition of forms in
large-scale works such as Ceremony 1988 which, in turn, are an extension of Eager's early investigative studies of domestic settings and the function of
objects in everyday life.
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