A little bit of everything I do

Jenny Watson’s latest exhibition, A little bit of everything I do, at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery does as it says on the tin, however, a ‘little bit’ of Jenny Watson is not diminutive or simplistic in any sense of the saying. Her current show is a transformational deep dive into the expansiveness of a 50-year career of one of Australia’s most profound and celebrated painters. Comprehending the entirety of Jenny Watson’s career is like putting a magnifying glass up to the History of Art and in this current exhibition we are privileged to a snapshot of this history. The exhibition entails a group of seven charming works on paper together with seven dazzling paintings, that capture the enduring style, technique and considerations Watson has explored since the 1980s.

Within the gallery space, we take a momentary respite in Watson’s inner world where memory lies on a bed of dreams, and we are offered witty anecdotes with signature Watson panache. In Old lady in a wheelchair, 2024 an elderly woman wheels off to the distance into abstract swathes of a sunset coloured background, floating in a two-dimensional foreground, her La Perla lingerie bag trailing from her wheelchair in an acerbic commentary on the aged female body in art and the historic depiction of women in the History of Art.

Ladder to fire, 2025 holds a similar humour-noir. Here, a gentleman-come-magician, dressed in 1960s mod attire and holding a glowering cigarette, is set to escape a fiery end. With a trail of smoke, he appears to climb out of the canvas down an actual miniature ladder propped up against the painting itself. Watching him is a flame-haired woman – an uncanny recreation of Jenny’s teenage self, who once lit up the world (and a cigarette) while skiving off youth club to meet her boyfriend. Within the artworks, symbols of time-travel to girlhood populate the surfaces. The red-headed girl makes regular appearances alongside cats, horses, girls in frilly dresses and bedrooms as Watson’s childhood diary comes to life through a language of dreamlike symbology peppered with real-life experiences. Vacillating between a fairytale-like nostalgia and real-world emotions, the power of this master painter is held in these considered aesthetic and subjective tensions.

Vignettes float dreamily through illusory landscapes, so beautifully captured in Titanic, 2024, where watery colour fields of deep blue, green and purple surge back-and-forth around a girl drifting out to sea in her bed. She appears to be drawn into an underworld - is she alive or dead? The surrealistic addition of an accompanying toy ‘Titanic’ placed on a shelf next to the work offers a subtle clue to the unfolding narrative.

Watson often employs non-traditional elements in her work from stickers to hand-painted text panels to shelves that house children’s toys, changing the original meaning and intention of the work. The artificiality of plastic toys juxtaposed with jewel-coloured brushy, backgrounds painted in gorgeous hues of the whole rainbow nod to Watson’s tongue-in-cheek charm and moments of peculiarity.

This anarchistic approach to painting has weaved its way through her canvases across the decades, established from a punk, anti-traditionalism that she has embraced and perfected since the 1980s. The artworks in this exceptional showcase are truly a lesson in painting. Watson is an absolute master in being able to harness conceptual complexity with a deliberate, relaxed simplicity captured by intentional brushstrokes - the deft and assured hand of a painter who knows how to hold back, discerning exactly when to stop and when to leave her audience wanting more.

- Victoria Scott