Dale Hickey / Australia b.1937 / Pie 1974 / Oil on canvas / 11.8 x 16.9cm / Purchased 2002 with funds from Wayne Kratzmann through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Dale Hickey

Dale Hickey
Pie 1974

Not Currently on Display

This work, Pie, like Apples 1974, exemplifies Dale Hickey’s painting of this period. He renders subjects as he perceives them, whilst carefully exploring the properties of light and colour with each layer of paint. He presents the humble yet ubiquitous meat pie, an Australian cultural icon, within a flat two-dimensional plane.

The object in this way acquires a sense of the illustrative, not unlike an image you would find in a child’s story book, or on a pub poster. In this case Hickey is painting the pie within the traditions of still life painting, and thus elevating a painted symbol of the Australian working class.

Dale Hickey was born on 31 July 1937 in Melbourne. Between 1954 and 1957 he studied graphic design at the Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne and for the next two years he worked as a graphic artist for ABC television.

From 1969 he began teaching and continued to pursue this profession for the next thirty years, working first in high schools and eventually as a senior lecturer in painting at Phillip Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Hickey went on to become one of the most influential teachers of graphic art in Melbourne.

Hickey is an artist for whom the act of painting is of prime importance. Throughout his continual shifts in style there has been a consistent re-investigation of painting, with later works referencing earlier series, all of which persistently address the subject of painting itself. His practice has encompassed both representational and more abstract styles of painting.


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