Artist Talk: Helen Eager

Join us at NERAM for an in conversation between exhibiting artist Helen Eager and NERAM Director Rachael Parsons as they discuss Eager’s survey exhibition Inner/Space.

Helen Eager has sustained a solo exhibition program for over three decades with her drawings, paintings and prints. Over the years, the shift from domestic interiors to pure abstraction has been a consistent evolution, her love of colour and light a constant thread.

Helen Eager studied at the South Australian School of Art in the 1970s. A Masters degree at COFA in the late eighties focused on large-scale works on paper, which took her drawing to a new level. A residency at the Greene St Studio in New York in 1988 was pivotal as Eager’s work evolved towards pure abstraction.

Over the past decade, Eager has explored compositions using chains of triangles on fields of white. In 2012, Eager was commissioned to create a wall painting for the Circular Quay entrance of the new Museum of Contemporary Art building. Eager’s work is included in all of Australia’s major public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia and National Gallery of Victoria. In 2022 Helen Eager’s projection “New York Sunday” illuminated the facade of the MCA during Vivid, Sydney.

A partnership with Utopia Art Sydney

Image: Helen Eager, New Directions, 2005. oil pastel on paper.