Red shift

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 into a harmonious oeuvre linked by colour and geometry, rhythm and light.

Since 1990 Dumbrell has lived in Bangkok while maintaining strong connections to Australia, with a second studio in Euroa, Victoria. 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.

Red shift 1968 is a key early hard -edge painting that reflects Dumbrell’s close affinities with her contemporaries of the late 1960s, many of whom were to be included in the landmark 1968 exhibition ‘The Field’ at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Notoriously only 3 of the 40 artists in that exhibition were women so her non-inclusion is not surprising while it is clearly now an oversight as this work is demonstrably comparable in quality in its composition and execution to the art works included. It reveals the artist’s sophisticated appreciation of the principles of hard edge abstraction at the very start of her career.