B. 1926 – 1996

Rosemary Ryan was an Australian artist who studied at the National Gallery School and under George Bell. She was an active member of the modernist movement, counting the Boyd family, John and Sunday Reed, Mirka Mora and Charles Blackman among her close associates. In the mid-1950s, she and her husband the journalist Patrick Ryan moved to London, where she exhibited two works in the significant Australian Artists’ Association exhibition at the Imperial Institute Art Gallery, London. 

Ryan’s style resists categorisation. There are elements of pop art, postmodernism and feminist art, references to Old Hollywood, the Renaissance and 18th century art captured in a dreamy, technically proficient hand. As the art critic and historian Bernard Smith observed of her second solo exhibition, she evokes “in Proustian fashion the quality of events half-remembered, half-forgotten… It is technically of interest to see the pop practice of disparate imagery being put to a coherent purpose, instead of being lost among incoherent ambiguities.”

Throughout her lifetime, Ryan helped paint Mirka Mora’s Cafe Balzac, was an early contributor to Melbourne’s ‘Transporting Art’ project, painting the no. 8 tram in 1979, and in 1983 gathered her illustrious circle of artist friends for a barbeque on the banks of the Yarra where they posed for her Australian version of George Seurat’s ‘La Grande Jatte’. An underexplored figure in Australian modernism, Ryan was a vital, distinct and exuberant artist.