Stephen Hall – AGES – Survey Exhibition
Grace Crossington Smith Gallery Sydney – June to July 2022
I first encountered a work by Stephen Hall downstairs at Coventry Gallery in Paddington in the early 1980’s, 1983, I think.
The apprehension of the work, a nude full body self-portrait, induced a nervous response in me as if bolts of electricity were racing through my nerves in a kind of mirror image of the portrait with its limbs twisted like the subject’s face in a contusion, extrusion of existential self-realisation in a hostile world.
I was shocked and delighted by the work in much the same way as I was when I first encountered a self-portrait by the German expressionist Egon Schiele in 1977 at the AGNSW. It seemed obvious to me that Hall’s self-portrait was influenced by Schiele.
The work had a heroic intensity and intention but, I was puzzled, hadn’t the artist as hero been proclaimed dead in the 1970s? Perhaps this was a statement of defiance, a kind of self-immolation under the critical gaze of feminism’s critique of male ambitions to conquer and reign supreme.
20 years later in the final third of the first decade of the 2000’s I once again encountered artwork by Hall. This time in one of the Depot galleries at Dank Street Waterloo.
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