Australian Galleries to say a sad farewell to Mosman artist Kerrie Lester

KERRIE Lester’s (left) last exhibition is going up on the walls of Australian Galleries in Paddington, and the smell of oil paint is making everyone sad.

Australian Galleries’ Stuart Purves prepares to hang some of Kerrie Lester’s paintings to be in the artist’s final exhibition. Picture: Elizabeth Fortescue

KERRIE Lester’s last exhibition is going up on the walls of Australian Galleries in Paddington, and the smell of oil paint is making everyone sad.

“That’s how Kerrie smelt — she smelt of oil paint,” a staff member says.

Gallery director Stuart Purves admits it feels “weird” to be hanging a show in the absence of the artist, a great character whose death in April prompted a flood of sympathetic phone calls to the gallery that has represented Lester since 1994.

The smell of the still-fresh paint in the gallery tells how Lester was still obsessively creating until about six months before her death from cancer on April 5.

“She was working on a show up until she couldn’t work any more,” Purves says.

Mosman artist Kerrie Lester at work in her Mosman studio in 2009.

Mosman artist Kerrie Lester sits among her many artworks in 2008.

Stuart Purves of Australian Galleries with a collection of Kerrie Lester’s paintings.

Together, a painting by Kerrie Lester. supplied by Australian Galleries.

A collection of Kerrie Lester’s artworks ahead of the exhibition.

Bird painting in bird-cage holder, by Kerrie Lester.

Australian Galleries intends this exhibition to pay tribute to the woman who was one of its stars. The gallery is showing her final paintings as well as pieces of her work that decorated her Mosman home. One very sweet collage of a man and woman, called Close, hung in her bedroom. The earliest work in the show is on loan from her mother. It’s a prize-winning painting Lester did when she was just 12 years old.

Purves says Lester’s gift was to understand the pathos of the human condition. “Dreams that are never really achieved (in life) are achieved in these paintings,” he says.

Her work was “experimental, ambitious and forthright”.

“I always feel in Kerrie’s paintings (that) you are holding hands with the painting,” Purves says. “You are not invited in, you are in. You are observing your dreams or yourself vicariously.”

The exhibition includes found objects collected by Lester, her palette, and quirky artworks such as the paintings she slotted into iPads where the screen would normally be.

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Lester’s paintings might have a dreamlike, poetic quality, but they belie the artist’s rather dramatic way of getting through life, Purves says.

Lester admitted she was inclined to be a rebel. As a schoolgirl at PLC Pymble, she was often in the naughty corner, Lester told this paper in 2004.

By sheer coincidence, Lester’s final exhibition opens on May 31 — what would have been her 63rd birthday.

The occasion is being treated as a memorial for Lester as well as a celebration of her art. Family and friends who gather on opening night will miss the larger-than-life presence of Lester herself.

“As (artist) Rodney Pople said, ‘you knew she was in the room’,” Purves says.

Kerrie Lester, In memory of ..., Australian Galleries, 15 Roylston St, Paddington; May 31 to June 19, 9360 5177, australiangalleries.com.au