Judy Cassab (b.1920) & John Seed (b.1945)
The Two of Us
To be opened by the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG
On Wednesday 30 September 2009, 6-8PM
Eva Breuer Art Dealer is proud to announce the opening of The Two of Us, the first exhibition to pair Judy Cassab with her son, John Seed. Within a few short years of arriving in post-war Sydney with her family in 1951, Judy Cassab became Australia's most celebrated portrait painter winning numerous prizes including the Archibald and the Australian Women’s Weekly Portrait Prize. John, a sculptor has carried on her great artistic legacy with exhibitions at the Bonython and Holdsworth galleries in the 1960s and 1970s as well as at the Centre Prize Gallery in London, at that time exhibiting under the name John Kampfner.
Judy has always been fascinated by personal narratives – from her own teeming journals made public in Judy Cassab Diaries (1995) to the portraits she sows with the stories of her sitters. In Lou Klepac’s monograph on Judy from 1998, she explains her artistic process;
'I am passionately interested in people’s childhood, why they choose the path they are on…In our age of the short attention span, the only other place where one could talk about these things is the psychiatrist’s couch.’
It is fitting then that The Two of Us will explore one of Judy’s most intimate relationships, that with her son. Today, at 89 years of age, Judy spends many of her days at John’s studio, sketching him at work with his welding tools and steel sculptures. John laments that he is not a more figurative artist as he cannot return the favour and sculpt his famed mother. Yet they share many wonderful likenesses in their work – from the exotic present in Cassab’s Sphinx with Girl 2008 and Seed’s Hindu Yantras to the abstracted Australian landscape which both mother and son explore with a shared fervour.
The Two of Us will be opened by the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG on Wednesday 30 September 2009. The exhibition will continue until Tuesday 13 October and will include many of Judy’s iconic paintings from 1955 until 2008, including Mother Holding Child 1995, a depiction of the unique and cherished relationship between mother and son.
Judy has always been fascinated by personal narratives – from her own teeming journals made public in Judy Cassab Diaries (1995) to the portraits she sows with the stories of her sitters. In Lou Klepac’s monograph on Judy from 1998, she explains her artistic process;
'I am passionately interested in people’s childhood, why they choose the path they are on…In our age of the short attention span, the only other place where one could talk about these things is the psychiatrist’s couch.’
It is fitting then that The Two of Us will explore one of Judy’s most intimate relationships, that with her son. Today, at 89 years of age, Judy spends many of her days at John’s studio, sketching him at work with his welding tools and steel sculptures. John laments that he is not a more figurative artist as he cannot return the favour and sculpt his famed mother. Yet they share many wonderful likenesses in their work – from the exotic present in Cassab’s Sphinx with Girl 2008 and Seed’s Hindu Yantras to the abstracted Australian landscape which both mother and son explore with a shared fervour.
The Two of Us will be opened by the Hon. Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG on Wednesday 30 September 2009. The exhibition will continue until Tuesday 13 October and will include many of Judy’s iconic paintings from 1955 until 2008, including Mother Holding Child 1995, a depiction of the unique and cherished relationship between mother and son.
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