B. 1945

Born in Melbourne, Anne Hall was twenty-three when she made her artistic debut at Melbourne’s South Yarra Gallery, earning high praise. In 1972, she married fellow artist John Perceval, thus initiating her into the Heide circle of artists, of whom Charles Blackman, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker were also members. 

Alongside Joy Hester and Mirka Mora, Hall forged a compelling female voice in an otherwise male dominated space. Her contributions are haunting: distorted, sinuous figures with eyes searching for connection and fingers reaching for touch. Then Herald Art Critic Alan McCulloch described her work as;

“highly imaginative, strong in observation of character and understanding of distortion”. 

Not only was she wed to Perceval, Hall was also his collaborator. Perceval’s biographer notes, for example, that she helped him complete his masterpiece ‘Veronica and the Conspirators’. Their marriage however, ended in 1981, following Percveal admission into a psychiatric hospital for alcoholism and schizophrenia in 1977.

Hall’s figuratism is not concerned with exact likeness. Rather, often following a single line as it loops around her subject, she is a recorder of souls; of emotional truths. In this way, her oeuvre is among the most revealing in the Antipodean movement. Like a live wire, Hall’s images spark, threatening to zap the viewer as they seize our attention.
 

Read our article on Anne Marie Hall here. 

Read the essay 'Dollhouse', here. 

Read Design and Art Australia Online biography of the artist, here.