Photo-media artist Anne Zahalka began studying art at East Sydney Technical College before going on to attain her undergraduate degree at Sydney College of the Arts and her Masters at the University of New South Wales. She began exhibiting in the 1980s, developing the first of successive bodies of work that reconfigure familiar images and modes of representation. Her 1987 exhibition Resemblance consisted of a group of contemporary photographic portraits mimicking the conventions of Dutch genre painting, for instance, and Welcome to Sydney (2001) situates sitters from diverse cultural backgrounds in identifiably Sydney suburban settings to question dominant ideas about national identity. The idea of the artist and the myths around 'genius' and the creative process are also ongoing themes in Zahalka's work. Her portraits of visual artists are characterised by a sense of artifice and theatre that parodies the idea of the 'creative genius' while simultaneously evoking the technical, manual work involved in making art. Her 1990 series of portraits of women artists, furthermore, derides the historical tendency to associate creativity and genius with maleness, and to exclude certain types of art practitioner from the 'great artist' narrative.
Gift of Leo Christie 2003. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Anne Zahalka/Copyright Agency, 2022
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