Frances Hodgkins, Summer c.1912, watercolour and charcoal on paper, collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery
9 November 2024 - 27 April 2025
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9 November 2024 - 27 April 2025 〰️
The modern city of Ōtepoti Dunedin was founded on civic values of progress and innovation. Home to Aotearoa New Zealand’s first university, first public secondary school for girls, first school of art, and the nation’s first public art gallery collection, Ōtepoti was a place where art and creativity could thrive. As the 19th century was drawing to a close, a new generation of artists was coalescing into a creative vanguard. Distinctive for the strong presence of women artists, this community was woven together through exhibitions, art societies and social networks – cementing Ōtepoti as a progressive centre for art in the 1880s and 1890s.
Groundbreakers considers the early careers of two of Ōtepoti’s most significant artists, Grace Joel and Frances Hodgkins, who were establishing their artistic practices in the city in the 1890s. Born in Ōtepoti in 1865, Grace Joel had left the city in her early 20s to attend the National Gallery School in Melbourne. After two periods of study, first in 1888-89 and then 1891-94, she returned home as an accomplished and awarded contemporary artist. Frances Hodgkins was born here in 1868 and, encouraged in her creative talents by her father William Mathew Hodgkins, attended private art tuition as well as classes at Dunedin School of Art. In 1890 Hodgkins exhibited her first works in Ōtepoti, and soon set her sights on an artistic career on the European continent.
Grace Joel, Untitled [back of female half nude], oil on canvas, Victorian College of Arts Collection, the university of Arts Collection
Focusing on this period in Ōtepoti’s art history, Groundbreakers places Joel and Hodgkins alongside artists including William Mathew Hodgkins, Jenny Wimperis, Isabel Field, Girolamo Nerli, Nellie Hutton, and other contemporaries. It explores how changing approaches to the landscape captured a view of Aotearoa that was becoming more grounded in lived experience. In parallel, Groundbreakers reveals how portraiture and figure painting offered artists, and in particular women artists, an empowered space for innovation and progress. Drawing together works from the collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena and beyond, this exhibition shows the different courses that Joel and Hodgkins charted through Ōtepoti’s art community as they broke through boundaries and expectations to forge international careers.