Deborah Halpern (1957- ) was born in Melbourne. Her parents, Sylvia and Artur Halpern, were both potters and she began her artistic career as an apprentice in their Sylha pottery in 1976. By the early 1980s, she was exhibiting at the annual Victorian Ceramic Show, the Meat Market Craft Centre and the Blackwood Street Gallery as well as tutoring at the Potters' School in Warrandyte. From 1987-1989, she completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts, Sculpture, at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education. During this period, she also completed "Angel", a mosaic sculpture commissioned for the south moat of the National Gallery of Victoria. "Ophelia", a sister sculpture designed for the Southgate Entrance in 1992 and named “the official face of Melbourne” by Tourism Victoria in 1996. Her work is seen as having been influenced by artists such as Dubuffet, Miro and Picasso. As well as making large-scale mosaic sculptures from concrete and clay or fibreglass, she creates handbuilt ceramic sculptures and vessel forms decorated in bright colours with drawings of human faces and animals. She has lectured in ceramics at higher education level, conducted workshops for Melbourne's Council of Adult Education, engaged in numerous solo and group exhibitions and public commissions and won many grants and awards. She had a long-standing association with the Christine Abrahams Gallery until it closed in November 2008. She works from a studio in Warrandyte and signs her work with a painted 'Deborah D. Halpern', 'D.D. halpern' or 'D.D.H.'
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