Introducing: Yvette Coppersmith

By Alex Pedley

Yvette Coppersmith Nude Self Portrait, after Rah Fizelle, 2016 Oil on linen 91.5 x 66 cm Photo credit: Tim Gresham

For over twenty years, Yvette Coppersmith has played with the limits of figurative painting, defying strict categories of not only the medium but of the portraiture genre itself. Over this time, she has created a style that is highly textural, tender and very much her own. Blending her subject matter and approach, Coppersmith emerges as a subtle and poignant contributor to broader contemporary artistic and political landscapes.

Her Self-portrait after George Lambert, which won her the 2018 Archibald Prize, gave the artist the chance to showcase the important historical, practical and creative place the self-portrait has occupied in not only the artist’s practice but in the practice of so many artists that have come before her. With a proclivity for an early modernist aesthetic, Coppersmith weaves into her portraiture the histories and sensibilities of not only her sitters, both real and impersonated, but so too her formal approach whether it be in the style of George Lambert, Rah Fizelle, or earlier Giorgio Morandi, with nods to Cubism or Dadaism amongst others. Importantly, she uses this process of stylistic costume change, as it were, in both content and form to investigate the female gaze in a historically maledominated field of artistic practice.

Her work Nude Self Portrait, after Rah Fizelle, 2016, currently on show in the landmark National Gallery of Australia exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Coppersmith understands that historically the power of image-making has not resided with women. She poses the important question, both directly and through her portraiture, ‘whose language are we using?’. For the artist, ‘if it is the language constructed by men for men’, then can ‘an image of a body be anything but conforming to or reacting against the existing framework’? This investigation applies not only to the position of the painter but to the hierarchies of painting, of image-making, and beyond. If there ever seems a tension in historical portraiture as to who the true subject is, sitter or painter, then Yvette Coppersmith subverts the question, situated as it is within historically hierarchical forms of male spectatorship. There is no better time to reflect upon the power of the image either. While ‘there are more important things than painting’, the artist says, amid climate and pandemic concerns, ‘we rely on images to understand ourselves, and to see where we have come from’. As a child, having always drawn faces and forms of especially female figures in costume, her process has always been an exploratory and revelatory exercise — and one that the artist shares with us.

A six-time finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, a five-time finalist in the Archibald Prize, and its winner in 2018, Coppersmith has also won the Inaugural Metro 5 Art Prize. Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, runs until 26 January 2022.

Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait with red and ochre abstraction, 2018 Oil on linen 51 x 41 cm Photo credit: Tim Gresham 15

Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait with black bird, 2020 Oil on linen 61.5 x 51.5 cm Photo credit: Matthew Stanton

Yvette Coppersmith Self-portrait, ochre shirt, 2018 Oil on linen 107 x 87 cm Photo credit: Matthew Stanton 19