Micky Allan: Perspective 1975-1987

About the exhibition
This solo exhibition brought together photographs, drawings and paintings spanning the career of Melbourne-born artist Micky Allan. Through a wide range of subjects—including portraiture, landscape and inner-city life—featured artworks traced Allan’s evolving practice, from her strong engagement with photography in the 1970s to her return to painting in the ’80s.

Showcasing Allan’s inventive use of materials and her adventurous interplay between media, the exhibition highlighted her pioneering hand-coloured, painted and documentary-style photography. It also explored how the camera became a means for Allan to document and reflect upon social relations, politics and collective action during the ’70s; while her return to painting in the following decade was marked by a deepening interest in spiritual and esoteric traditions, including Taoism, Sufism and Egyptian mythology.

In a catalogue essay titled ‘In the Tracks of Isis’, art historian Memory Holloway described Allan as an artist deeply involved in a search for meaning beyond visual pleasure—despite the fact that, in late 1980s Australia, it was considered unfashionable to speak of the spiritual in art.

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^{Image: Micky Allan, Anubis 1985, oil and collage on linen, 45.5 x 33 cm. Collection of the artist}