ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA.- South Australian born Margaret Preston (1875-1963) is Australia’s most famous woman artist. Her iconic depictions of urban and outback landscapes and her vibrant floral still-life pictures from the 1920s, 30s and 40s remain among the most loved Australian works of art ever produced.

Margaret Preston: Art & Life is a major national traveling exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of NSW and showing in Adelaide at the Art Gallery of South Australia through August 13. It features around 200 of Preston’s paintings, woodblock prints and linocuts as well as ceramics, drawings, photographs and documents relating to her extraordinary life and fifty year career.

Margaret Preston was born Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide in 1875. Strongly opinionated and often described as a red-headed firebrand, she lived in Adelaide throughout her formative years, working and teaching from her King William Street studio. Hans Heysen was an early teacher of the artist and reportedly labeled her a “shameless hussy” for unabashedly sitting immediately in front of a nude model in a life drawing class. Today, Preston rivals Heysen for the title of South Australia’s great artistic prodigy. After traveling and studying in Europe for a number of years, Margaret Preston returned to Australia to pioneer the modern art movement. She promoted the need for a national art form and was the first artist to advocate Aboriginal art. Her pictures incorporating native flora and Indigenous motifs were instantly recognizable and many appeared as cover illustrations for magazines such as Woman’s World, Home and Art in Australia.

Exhibition Curator, Deborah Edwards from the Art Gallery of NSW says ”Margaret Preston was the best known of her generation of Australian artists with her commanding compositions – predominantly still-lifes, landscapes and scenes of Sydney. These works have continued to be, over the past 70 years, amongst the most popular of all Australian artists’ images.” Edwards and co-curator, Rose Peel have spent 5 years locating works for this exhibition which includes works drawn from public and private collections in Australia, the UK and New Zealand, including the Art Gallery of South Australia’s own outstanding Margaret Preston collection.

Margaret Preston: Art & Life showcases the artist’s long and successful career, bringing together the most significant aspects of her practice, her nationalism and her relationship to Aboriginal art, as well as the lesser-known aspects of her career, including her ceramics and her mature development as an imposing landscapist during the 1940s and 1950s.

Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Christopher Menz says “Margaret Preston has always had a strong following in her home city of Adelaide and we expect this highly-anticipated and very beautiful retrospective to be our most popular exhibition this year”.