Painting the banal: Dale Hickey and Robert Hunter, 1966-1973

Abstract

A significant development within art of the 1960s and 1970s was the dispersal of the traditional artistic mediums, and their replacement by a disparate array of installation, performance, documentary and theoretical practices that have come to define the landscape of contemporary art. This thesis examines the historical emergence of this contemporary ‘post-medium condition’ through the work of two Melbourne-based artists, Dale Hickey (born 1937) and Robert Hunter (1947–2014), from their hard-edge modernist painting of the mid 1960s, to their engagement with minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptual art at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next. During this period, Hickey an..