Flashes of distant memories and glimpses of recent events are writ large in Private views and rear visions 2020–22 — the acquisition focus for the 2024 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal — by contemporary Australian artist Jenny Watson (b.1951). Comprising 48 paintings, the work’s scale alludes to fresco paintings, with each frame holding an individual scene. Taken from Watson’s personal recollections, the images depicted across the work range from treasured familial interactions to daydreams, to unexceptional everyday occurrences.

Horses and lone women are hallmarks of the artist’s practice; within the multifarious scenes of Private views and rear visions, these provide a sense of rhythm as they reappear in various guises. In one picture, a blonde woman bedecked in royal blue is absorbed by her phone; in another, a female figure lies spread‑eagled beneath a vision of a whirlpool overhead — conveying, perhaps, the sense of vertigo suffered after a fall from a horse.

Throughout her career, Watson has complicated the relationship between ideas of originality and standardisation, as well as between painting and conceptual art. This blurring of dualities is continued by the two layers of images in Private views and rear visions: each of the 48 images has been painted
on the printers’ proof of an exhibition catalogue for ‘Chronicles’, an earlier solo show by Watson.1 Within the catalogue proofs, some of the artist’s early paintings of department‑store advertising can be seen, such as A painted page: Myers Christmas catalogue 1979 — where mass print is translated into unique
paintings. Yet, in Private views and rear visions, these works are themselves transformed into mass-produced imagery. By using multiple copies of the catalogue as a backdrop, the repeatedly reproduced artworks begin to resemble the motifs or patterns found in printed and embroidered textiles, which the artist is renowned for using as painting substrates.

Artworks from across Watson’s 50-year career appear in the Chronicles publication proofs. However, the sense of her career having a linear trajectory — created by the chronologically structured catalogue — is scrambled in Private views and rear visions, as the pages appear out of order or upside down. With paintings from different eras of Watson’s extensive oeuvre sitting side by side and the new artwork layered on top, time condenses and stretches; her manipulation of time is further compounded by the newly painted content, which includes a mix of old memories and recent observations.

Through Private views and rear visions, Jenny Watson conveys the way that emotion, memory and humour inform the way we experience the tempo of life.