Irony, Humour & Dissent: Recent Australian Drawings

About the exhibition
Irony, Humour & Dissent brought together recent works by eleven artists based in Melbourne and Sydney, highlighting how irony can serve as a tool for critique and caricature. Centred on drawing as a medium, the exhibition featured fifty works—mostly on paper—created with graphite, charcoal, pencil and ballpoint pen.

Highlights included eight lively mixed-media improvisations by Gareth Sansom, an avant-gardist known for merging pop culture, personal iconography, sexual transgression and film into psychological landscapes influenced by twentieth-century abstraction. Also featured were six deceptively simple, cartoon-like line drawings by Linda Marrinon—including one of a man, a knife and a chook—that exemplified her distinctive mix of wit, irony, pathos and feminist critique.

Another notable work was Dale Frank’s large-scale self-portrait from 1985, complete with bulging eyes. Writing for The Australian, well-known critic Robert Rooney observed: ‘It strikes me as being funny because the image is so like a fin de siècle portrait of Louie the Fly.’

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Linda Marrinon, Chicken and the Knife 1989, line drawing, published in The Australian, 5 August 1989}