Joy Hester
1920–1960 · Australian avant-garde painter and draughtsman
Joy Hester (Melbourne, 1920-Prahran, 1960) was an Australian artist associated with the Angry Penguins and the Heide Circle, two groups central to the country's avant-garde. She is best remembered for her ink drawings, with bold, expressive lines shaped by her father's death, the threat of war and her own illness.
After studying at the National Gallery of Victoria's art school, she spent time at the home of Sunday and John Reed, where she met young artists. She was the only woman to publish work in the magazine Angry Penguins. In the mid-1940s she gave up oil painting to focus on watercolour and ink, with the human face as her main subject. Her Face, Sleep and Love series (1948-1949) belongs to this phase.
Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1947, she produced work marked by the illness. She sold little during her lifetime, as Australian modernism favoured large oil paintings, and critics dismissed her work as distressing. She died in 1960. Her reputation was revived by the 1981 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria and by her 2018 exhibition with Patricia Piccinini at TarraWarra.