B. 1920 – 1960 

Joy Hester was a singular figure in Australian modernism. After studying at the National Gallery School, she married fellow artist Albert Tucker with whom she had a son, Sweeney, in 1945. Tucker and Hester were supported by arts patrons and collectors John and Sunday Reed, living in their artist commune, Heide. A compatriot of Charles Blackman, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd, Hester was the only woman to participate in the avant-garde Angry Penguins group. 

In 1947, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, departing her family to start a life with artist and poet Gray Smith. She continued producing art over the next decade, working almost exclusively in ink and wash. Her work is an intense, emotionally fraught mediation on the taboos of the time: love; sex; birth; and death. When she passed away from cancer in 1960, her former husband – Tucker – worked hard to preserve her legacy. 

Hester’s work is represented across public collections and she has been the subject of exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia and TarraWarra. As critic Michael Fitzgerald wrote, “Hester’s drawings still suck the oxygen from the air, providing some of the clearest-eyed images in Australian art”. 

 
To read a more in-depth biography of the artist, click here.