Festival Theatre across the Torrens

Jacqueline Hick is recognised as one of South Australia’s finest artists and one of our most incisive social observers.  

Making an early decision to focus on the human form rather than experiment with abstraction, a new aesthetic became evident in her work during the 1950s. Sombre tonalities, blocking of primary forms, and a preference for everyday events and situations, such as people relaxing in a park or waiting for a train, characterise her oeuvre.  

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hick attracted national attention for scenes of Australia and her unique technique of glazing and wiping dark pigment across white-primed Masonite panels. In her paintings, Hick treated the subject matter as part of the environment with which it was identified. In studying her paintings, it seems impossible to separate the two. The figure or subject matter, like the Festival Centre and the surrounding landscape are discernible yet they have a quality of oneness. 

Hick was a foundation member of the South Australian Branch of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia and exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society group in the 1942 exhibition First Exposition. Hick was a Fellow of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts and was made an Honorary Life member in 1993. She also served on the Board of the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1968.