Study for 'Columbine'

Trained in Melbourne between 1959-62, Dumbrell’s early response to international abstraction, sparked by her encounter with op art in the 1960s, led her to form a distinct personal language of painting based on non-representational form. Abstraction became foundational to her practice and has remained the driving force in her art over the subsequent six decades.

Dumbrell’s career was shaped by the rise of the women's art movement in Australia - she was a co-founder of the Women’s Art Register, a member of the Lip collective and participated in exhibitions that asserted the rightful place of women artists within the art world. Her uncompromising commitment to her own practice - which stood in contrast to many of her female peers in terms of style - stands as a testament to her individuality, while also reflecting her embrace of ‘female’ decorative aesthetics within the forms of abstract painting.

While predominantly a painter, Dumbrell is also keenly committed to drawing, and lately, to sculpture. Inextricably linked, her work in all mediums coalesce in a harmonious oeuvre linked by colour and geometry, rhythm and light.

Study for ‘Columbine’ is a preparatory study for Columbine (2008), a painting in the Gallery’s collection. Drawings are always part of Dumbrell’s process, as are more realised colour works on paper. Columbine is from a period when the artist was living at Euroa in the Strathbogie Ranges of Victoria, where she found her work was infused with the local atmosphere and landscape. The grid, which had been a strong foundational structure within her work gradually came to be replaced with more random geometric systems, while the colour and lineal structures remained connected with her immediate environment.

Since 1990 Dumbrell has lived in Bangkok while maintaining strong connections to Australia, with her second studio in Euroa. These two very different environments with their distinctive light, climate, landscape and energies have inflected her painting over time. Dumbrell’s explorations of the possibilities of abstract form are grounded in a deeply felt, intuitive and sensate response to place – the light, colours and forms of landscape and her immediate environment. Highly ordered and exactly rendered, her paintings are immersive and compelling objects that transport the viewer into worlds of vibrant rhythm and sensation.