While there is not a great deal known about Anne Marie Hall, in this collection of original works intriguing glimpses emerge. There’s the perspicacious ‘Untitled (Shades of Blue)', an oil portrait painted in 1966 when the artist was just twenty-one, the year before her debut exhibition at South Yarra Gallery and start of her relationship with John Perceval.
Rather than explicit studies of place of person, Hall's works are visages of feeling, character and memory. She had an acute sense of her subject’s personality, painting a karate kid in ‘Untitled (Karate)’, a reticent matriarch in ‘Motherly Portrait’ and a woman at work in ‘Slip Slip Knit’.
Considered the heir to the Figurative Expressionist school, Hall’s style is feminine, brutal, twisted, cute and searing – a molten nexus of originality, talent and daring. Her figures are sometimes caught in impossible states, tadpoles gliding through space or tangles of limbs dancing towards combustion. In these configurations lie insights into the paradoxical expectations placed on women and the complexities of our inner lives.
Angela Tandori, Director of Art & Collectors, with Anne Marie Hall's 'Untitled (Prismatic Portrait)'
"For me, the power of Anne Marie Hall's work lies in its perceptiveness and bold femininity."
Like Joy Hester and Mirka Mora, Hall forged a compelling female voice in an otherwise male dominated space. That her career was at times overshadowed by her marriage is a testament to the era’s issues with gender parity. Placed against her Figurative Expressionist peers and represented at the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia and Ian Potter Museum, Hall’s paintings stand tall. They are bold, strange, otherworldly and commanding, insights into how people live, feel and dance through life.
