Vale: Normana Wight

Wed 4 Feb 2026

The Gallery acknowledges the passing of renowned Brisbane-based painter and printmaker Normana Wight (1936–2026), whose astute visual acuity and generous, inquiring spirit will be missed. Wight pursued a singular vision across a range of artistic disciplines over her 60-year career. Born in Melbourne, she studied painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1954–57), designed fabrics and taught art before travelling to London to study printmaking at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1962–63).

Wight returned to Australia in 1964, and to Melbourne in 1967, where she taught at the Preston (later Phillip) Institute of Technology. At this time, her practice attracted the interest of curators Brian Finnemore and John Stringer, who included her work in ‘The Field’, the groundbreaking exhibition of Australian ‘hard edge’ or ‘colour field’ painting and sculpture that opened in 1968 at the new flagship St Kilda Road premises of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). With Janet Dawson and Wendy Paramour, Wight was one of only three women among the 40 artists in the exhibition, which foregrounded the influence of a minimal style that had developed in North America in the 1940s and 1950s. Wight’s was represented by the monumental, two-part, vertically oriented hyperboloid Untitled 1968 (illustrated) , which she subsequently destroyed because she was unable to store it.

The Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria featuring Normana Wight’s Untitled 1968

Untitled yellow-green 1970 (illustrated), dates from this seminal period. The radiating bands of complementary colours in the artwork recall Wight’s work in ‘The Field’, albeit differing in the horizontal format of its repeated modular components. Wight screen-printed her pigments onto these six canvas panels, creating an effect that invoked her work as a fabric designer and printmaker. In this way, she mounted a subtle yet compelling challenge to the established conventions of oil painting.

Untitled yellow-green 1970

Wight would go on to forge a career in printmaking, which she saw as a democratic art. Her print and postcard works — produced in multiples and often using new technologies such as computer-generated images — were a response to the strictures of the commercial gallery system. Wight moved to Queensland in the mid-1970s, later teaching at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. A visiting Fellow at the Queensland College of Art in 1993–94, she settled in Brisbane in 2001. Her formative abstract practice was subsequently the focus of two exhibitions at Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane — ‘Queensland Art 2009’ (2009) and ‘Normana Wight: Minimal Painting’ (2010). In 2018, the NGV included Wight’s recreation of Untitled 1968 in ‘The Field Revisited’, confirming her place in a pivotal Australian artistic watershed.

Delve deeper into the QAGOMA Collection

Untitled - yellow violet 1967

Untitled 1967

Untitled - blue to orange 1967

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia