Margery Edwards

Who was Margery Edwards?

Margery Edwards was an Australian Spiritual Abstract Expressionist working in mixed media. Born in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1933, she studied in Sydney, the Brera Academy of Art in Milan, and at the Morley College Art School in London, before moving to New York in 1974. In New York, Edwards arrived at her signature style of abstract painting and collage, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement in American painting in the late 1940s and 1950s. At the core of Abstract Expressionism was a belief in the spontaneous freedom of the individual artist and the expression of the inner world of the artist's psychology and spirituality. Such art referred only distantly or obliquely, if at all, to the outside world.

As a style, Abstract Expressionism also ranged over two very different sensibilities, both reflected in Edwards' work. One was characterized by energetic brushwork and rhythmic, dynamic compositions, as seen in the works of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Antoni Tàpies.