Jacky Redgate is regarded as one of Australia's leading contemporary artists, with a practice extending four decades. Born in London 1955, Redgate emigrated to Australia in 1967 where her career began in the context of late 1970s feminism, minimalism and conceptual art. A key figure in Australian art since the mid-1980s, Redgate made her name as a photographer, with such classic series as Photographer Unknown, Naar Het Schilder-Boeck, and Work-To-Rule, but also works in sculpture and installation.
A common thread in her work is an interest in the differences between various systems - be they personal, such as snapshots, or impersonal, such as mathematics. Redgate's work explores the interplay of systems of perception and representation, particularly in relation to photography and what occurs in the translation of the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional images. Much of her work is a meditation on photography, its optics and gazes. Reflecting on the traditions of modernity in particular, she is well known for her mirror works using objects, light and colour, blurring distinctions between mediums, painting and photography, and genres, still life and abstraction.
From the beginning of her practice, Redgate’s work has been included in various important exhibitions across the globe, including exhibitions in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, Institute of Contemporary Arts in England, Museum of Photographic Arts in the United States of America and the National Museum of Art in Japan.
Additionally, Redgate has featured in major survey exhibitions and monographs, in 2004, Alan Cruickshank, Director of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia presented a comprehensive three-part survey exhibition of Redgate's work and a substantial artist monograph Michael Desmond, Imagining Space in Jacky Redgate: 1980-2003, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide (2005), which formed the basis of similar surveys at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney in 2005. The survey exhibition at the MCA titled Life of the System incorporated a curatorial project by Redgate of selected works from the MCA Collection.
In 2008 the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane staged an exhibition of her work titled Visions From Her Bed, curated by Robert Leonard. Leonard recognised a common thread in her artwork. This commonality being an interest in both personal and impersonal systems and staged her early art school work alongside a selection of works from the previous survey exhibitions including her seminal found photographic series photographer unknown (1980-83). In 2012, the exhibition Jacky Redgate: the logic of vision, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney curated by Judy Annear bought together the holdings of Redgate's work in the collection. Putting the emphasis on her photographic practice, the exhibition of 15 works surveyed Redgate's creative trajectory from the 1980s until now. In 2016, Redgate's mirror works, included a new project using found photographs in an exhibition titled Jacky Redgate: Mirrors at the University Art Gallery, the University of Sydney curated by Ann Stephen and Robert Leonard, and a comprehensive publication that unpacks the significance of her early work and mirror works.
Redgate has received numerous competitive grants through the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council, including a 2007 Australia Council Fellowship and in 1987, the highly prestigious overseas fellowship residency, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Her work is included in major national and international collections and has been supported and written about extensively by some of Australia's most important scholars, curators and writers, including: Judy Annear, Geoffrey Batchen, Michael Desmond, Helen Ennis, Blair French, Ross Gibson, Shaune Lakin, Robert Leonard, Ann Marsh and Ann Stephen.
She is a recipient of the 1st prize, Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011) and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award (First Prize) (2006).
