Annette Bezor

Annette Bezor (5 April 1950 – 9 January 2020), born Annette Bateman, was an Australian painter and feminist, who lived and worked in Adelaide, South Australia. She was known for appropriating classical and pop culture images of women and using them to create stylised representations of them, often sexually charged images but not pandering to the male gaze and thereby highlighting society's attitudes towards women. Her work won significant commercial and critical success.

Bezor had 30 solo exhibitions, with her works exhibited throughout Australia as well as in Europe, Hong Kong, and the USA. She was a finalist in multiple art prizes in Australia, including the Archibald, Doug Moran and Sulman prizes as well as the Portia Geach Memorial Award in Sydney.

Early life Bezor was born on 5 April 1950 in Adelaide, South Australia, into a working-class family, the second child of Alma (Billi) Smith and policeman Keith Bateman. After her parents divorced, she changed her surname to Bezor, which originated from her mother's family. She left school at 14 because of bullying, and worked in a hairdressing salon where a remark by the manager on her "puppy fat" led to her suffering from anorexia for four years. She married twice, briefly.

In 1974 she enrolled in the South Australian School of Art and graduated in 1977 with a degree in fine art. She afterwards said that she had felt "stultified" working in the male-dominated art school environment, and did her best work at home. In the mid-1970s the Women's Art Movement in South Australia was strong, which Bezor found empowering. She was awarded the Australia Council's studio residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, which she took up in 1987 and where she painted Romance is in the Air. This was described by her agent Paul Greenaway as a "turning point in her career", where she worked on developing her signature style of appropriating images of women and subverting them in her paintings. The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds two paintings, Pigs and Rosie as Eve. The National Gallery of Victoria holds three works, including The Snake is Dead.

Awards Bezor's work has been selected as finalists in several major art prizes, and has won three smaller ones. ) Sir John Sulman Prize, 1992, 2002 & 2009, finalist Portia Geach Memorial Award, 1993 & 1999, finalist John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize, 1981, 1983 & 1994, finalist Sara Weis Award, 1992, first prize Maude Vizard Wholohan Art Prize, co-winner John Christie Wright Memorial Prize for Life Drawing and Painting, 1977, winner

Fellowships 2010 Arts SA Fellowship 1990 Australia Council Fellowship