Sally Smart
Domestic person II, 1989
Sally Smart is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, renowned for producing large-scale cut-out assemblage installations and, more recently, the combination of performance and video within this form. Her practice engages with identity politics and the relationships between the body and culture.
Smart’s Domestic person II belongs to a series of works which were exhibited in 1989 under the title X-ray Vanitas. This body of work was concerned with ideas around identity and the alter-ego of the artist. In the Vanitas series Smart presents a cast of female characters as iconic images on canvas. Some of the women are identifiable public personalities from history, while others have a distinctly private reference, being formed by the artist’s own memory and imagination. Pioneer women, mad women, fairy tale characters and artists such as Margaret Preston and Bessie Davidson (Sally Smart’s great aunt) are both represented and brought together in Smart’s fragmentary figures which remind us of the transience of life and the impermanence of material trappings. These paintings are deliberately and proudly dramatic and theatrical, and have strong surrealist overtones. They speculate on the role of women in society, and by extension, the profile and position of female artists within the art world.
- Artist / Maker
- Sally Smart (1960)
- Creation Date
- 1989
- Collection
- University Art Collection
- Subjects
- Art and design - paintings
- Materials used
- oil and enamel on canvas
- Dimensions
(H x W x D) - 167.1 x 121.4 cm
- Credit line
- The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of Gareth Sansom, 1990
- Accession number
- 1990.0008.000.000
- Copyright
- © Sally Smart/Copyright Agency, 2025 Request Access