Mandy Martin (1952-2021) was a critically acclaimed Australian artist whose career spanned 45 years. Martin was a feminist artist who emerged and rose to prominence in the mid-1970s. An early reputation for political and socially progressive imagery established an ideological framework for a landscape-based art practice that examined the European and industrial colonisation of Australia, and a long-term and active commitment to the Australian environment.

In 2020 and 2021 Mandy Martin worked closely with Geelong Gallery Director and CEO Jason Smith on the selection of 67 prints, drawings and paintings dating from 1975-2017, and that encapsulate her career-long picturing of the power and politics of industry and something of the impacts of human beings on natural environments. Geelong’s holding tells the important story of her political printmaking, her industrial subjects, and the recurring format and subject of the coastal and panoramic landscape. Each of these emphases is precisely right for Geelong’s collection, and the broader context of Geelong as a post-industrial city on Corio Bay.

This exhibition will be a powerful survey of Mandy Martin’s iconic industrial and landscape subjects, and has been programmed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the artist’s birth.