Jenny Watson

Jenny Watson was born in 1951 in Melbourne, Australia. She had her first exhibition at Chapman Powell Street Gallery Melbourne in 1973. She lived in London, Paris and New York for different periods between 1975 and 1979. Watson had a lot of different stylistic approaches to her painting, incorporating language and text and a range of different materials and fabrics, such as velvet and collaged elements. Her subject matter has always tended towards the autobiographical. After her 1976–77 “Houses” series, in which she painted her childhood homes, Watson moved from the exterior world to the interior world with her 1981 work “Dream Palette”. Based on her dream journal, Watson assembled images and texts on 36 small canvas boards. Watson has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include “Chronicles”, at the Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane; “Birds”, at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; “Here, There, and Everywhere”, at Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; “Layerings”, at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourn; “Other Lives”, at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; “Striped Paintings and Undercover”, at Gimpel Fils, London. Watson’s work is held in major state and regional galleries in Australia and in a number of overseas collections, including Yokohama Museum, Japan; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan; Ulmer Museum, Germany; and Vienna Academy of Arts and Craft, Vienna. She currently lives between Brisbane in Australia and Europe.