Mary Norrie was an influential exponent of hard-edge abstraction and colour-field painting in Brisbane. Alongside Irene Amos and Joy Hutton, she was part of the Wednesday Group of women artists, who sublet a studio at St Mary’s Anglican Church in Kangaroo Point every week on a Wednesday, from 1961. 

Red square is evidence of the development of colour-field painting in Queensland at a pivotal moment in Australian art: it was painted a year before the opening of the historic exhibition ‘The Field’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. Norrie exhibited widely throughout the state over her career, and her paintings were likely the first of their kind seen by the public in regional Queensland.