Kerrie Lester

Kerrie Lester (1953–2016) was born in Sydney and studied at the National Art School and the Alexander Mackie College 1971 - 1975. She held her first solo exhibition in 1976 and since then more than 21 solo exhibitions over a thirty year period and also featured regularly in group exhibitions including the Archibald prize, the Wynne and Sulman Prizes and the Mosman Art Prize, which she won in 2011. In conjunction, Lester has been represented in many important group exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney in 1979 and Australian Perspecta in 1981 and 1985.

Her work featured portraits and observations of the everyday life including joyful images of swimming, fishing and boating around her local harbourside community of Mosman, Sydney. The works in the museum collection from 1999 feature her trademark pictorial technique of bold hand-stitched outlines and application of flotsam and jetsam – artworks of painting, drawing, and collage.

Her work is represented in many public, corporate and private art collections across Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery. Lester also lectured at the City Art Institute Sydney, the National Art School Sydney and Seaforth Technical College.

She featured in the Archibald Prize at least sixteen times, as a regular runner-up, and the Portia Geach Memorial Award shortlist nine times from 1988 until her death in 2016. Her tongue-in-cheek self-portrait as a bridesmaid took out the Archibald’s Packing Room Prize in 1998.

As art critic John MacDonald wrote in her obituary Sydney Morning Herald 6 April 2016 'Lester's paintings are decorative in the best sense, intended to give pleasure but retaining a high degree of pictorial intelligence. She was in the tradition of the Impressionists, who ignored the grand themes and set out to capture the busy pageant of modern living. The people in her pictures always seem to be enjoying themselves, and this undoubtedly reflected the artist's own pleasure in the studio. She was a painter who saw art not as a lofty and noble calling, but as an intrinsic celebration of life.'