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In April/May 2013 the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra, New South Wales, via the initiative and expertise of guest curator Max Dingle, presented an authoritative and visually appealing retrospective of Melbourne abstractionist Margaret Dredge. As the artist who enjoyed a near four-decade working life in Melbourne was prolific but not widely acquired by public galleries, the majority of the works were from private holdings and even more effective and surprising because of their freshness and unfamiliarity. Thus the exhibition had something of the éclat of the magician's or burlesque artiste's 'reveal', given the amount of visual material that abounds in our digital age. The collection of non- figurative artworks from the latter half of the 20th centuiy had a presence and composure, particularly emphasised in the consistent achievements of the last decade or so of Dredge's career that prompted a favourable, engaged response from a general audience at the opening. This positive, open response is not necessarily a given with recent art - and certainly not with the uncompromising dualism and Darwinian certainty of Australian contemporaiy art in the 1950s to 1970s, nor with non art professionals - and credit must be given to this still relatively unfamiliar artist.
Like all historic women artists, the questions raised by revisiting the work from a sympathetic yet informed position and systematically curating an overview as presented here by Dingle, are the malleable and contentious ones of reputation and historiography and how this impacts upon the critical and curatorial understanding of both the artist and the larger canonical narratives against (or with) which she stands. Here the sum of Dredge's conscious and self-monitored achievement - certainly after years of applied consideration in her studio - and the well-judged curatorial and institutional contextualising of her work in the retrospective prompt a particularly rich series of debates around public memoiy, and institutional, academic and journalistic practice in this countiy. The breadth of these debates alone indicates that Dredge merits a greater profile in public cultural memoiy in Australia.
The art and social histoiy evidence as to why Dredge should have a greater profile in public cultural memoiy in Australia is compelling but, it should be noted, these ideas are not the ones that the artist herself would have mandated. Unlike...
