Lesley Dumbrell creates art of pure visual pleasure. This exhibition, spanning her five-decade career, showcases her unique visual language and mastery of colour, movement and rhythm.

Including paintings, works on paper and the artist’s recent foray into sculpture, Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum presents over 90 works drawn from major Australian public and private collections, in a selection that ranges from the experimental and unfinished to the highly realised and refined. Alongside the exuberant Spangle 1977 and Solstice 1974, a visitor favourite in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection, the exhibition features landmark paintings including Foehn 1975 and Tramontana 1984, and early-career works such as Red shift 1968 and Promontories 1969.

Starting in 1969 with hard-edge and optical paintings, the exhibition reveals Dumbrell’s development as an assured and ambitious painter with a distinctive voice. Her perennial fascination with colour relationships and the organising power of the grid has seen these elements become potent vehicles for her expression of experience and emotion, sensation and place. Now in her eighties, Dumbrell continues to explore colour and form, with laser-cut metal sculptures the latest advance in a practice characterised by intuition, experimentation and play.