HOME | CATALOGUE | BIOGRAPHY | HIS PHILOSOPHY | CONTACT

     

THE ART OF FRANK HINDER
by Renee Free & John Henshaw with Frank Hinder

Phillip Mathews Book Publishers, Sydney 2011
180 pages, circa 150 illustrations in colour. $75.00 inc GST

Frank Hinder's work has a range wide in subject matter,styles and media. His training in Dynamic Symmetry in America led him, on the return to Sydney, to join Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson as one of the Sydney Modernists of the 1930s and 1940s. His interest in dynamism distinguished his work as closer to Futurism than Cubism. During the war his geometric abstracts, like those of Balson and Crowley were Sydney’s earliest abstracts. Contemporaneously he was serving in Camouflage, painting Bomber Crash and other war subjects from personal experience. After the war he developed his pre-war Wynyard series into post-war darkness, but with re-emerging light, as in Subway Escalator, 1953. In 1952, Hinder won the Blake prize for Religious art with Flight into Egypt.

During the second half of the 20th century, Hinder devoted himself to abstract art, to make visible modern scientific and philosophic thought, from the Pythagoreans to Einstein and beyond. Hinder believed in the connectedness of everything, in the harmony of the universe. Light, in paint and in light boxes, symbolised beauty and human intelligence. The final decade saw an integration of semi-abstracts and luminous abstracts; matter dissolved into energy, vibrations, memory.

Renee Free gained a B.A. in Sydney in 1956 and a Postgraduate Academic Diploma in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, London University in 1961. She joined the Art Gallery of New South Wales as Assistant in 1966 and retired as Senior Curator of European Art in 1996.

John Henshaw was a friend of Frank Hinder, colleague, artist, teacher, who died before this book could become a reality. The book has been published due to the support of the artist’s daughter, Enid Hawkins.