NGV Media Home > NGV Exhibition Summaries 2009
This exhibition will present a selection of acquisitions made for the NGV Prints and Drawings collection since 2001. Over 1000 works on paper have entered the collection during this period through purchase, donation or bequest, and Building a Collection represents only a small percentage of the total number of works acquired. The works have been selected to sample some of the most outstanding works to enter the Collection with an emphasis on representing contemporary practice in both the Australian and international fields.
Key highlights will include Joseph Lycett’s landmark album, Views of Australia (1824-25), which will be displayed for the first time and the unveiling of a record drawing made in black and white chalk by Gian Domenico Tiepolo after his father’s painting The Banquet of Cleopatra, before it left the studio in 1743.
Building a Collection will also pay tribute to our supporters, patrons and donors, whose assistance has been critical to the growth and augmentation of the Collection.
Since the nineteenth century photography has been a means by which people could discover the world. Photographs of exotic places and ‘others’ have been a compelling subject and for Australian contemporary photographers, the exotic is as close to home as Asia or as far away as Europe.
Long Distance Vision: Three Australian Photograhers will consider the work of well known Australian photographers Max Pam and Matthew Sleeth, who have photographed not only aspects of the everyday at home but venture forth with the delighted, but not uncritical, eyes of the traveller.
In 1991 an extraordinary gift from Joan and Peter Clemenger enabled the National Gallery of Victoria to establish the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, a triennial exhibition and award that celebrates the ongoing achievement of some of Australia’s most distinguished contemporary artists.
The Clemenger Contemporary Art Award has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most prestigious and exciting visual arts events in Australia. Previous recipients of the Award are Bea Maddock (1993), Richard Larter (1996), John Nixon (1999), John Mawurndjul (2003) and Judy Watson (2006).
The 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award is the sixth in the series and will draw together a group of established artists whose work is conceptually and stylistically diverse, yet unified in its engagement with some of the prevailing cultural and social issues of contemporary life. As the previous five exhibitions have demonstrated, the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award is national in its scope, cross-generational, and brings into dialogue the works of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists.
As close neighbours, Australia and New Zealand share common fashion ground. Regional identities in a global fashion system, Australian and New Zealand designers have received international recognition for their distinctive and original approaches.
Bringing together a selection of work from the last decade, this exhibition will highlight the dynamic practices of eight leading contemporary Australian and New Zealand independent fashion labels. Drawing on recent NGV acquisitions, Together Alone will investigate and contrast the sometimes disquieting sources of inspiration that lie at the heart of these designers’ works.
Artists include Toni Maticevski, MaterialByProduct, World, NomD and Zambesi.
Chinoiserie refers to a style in Western art which draws its inspiration from the arts of China, Japan and India. European fascination with exotic materials like lacquer, silk and porcelain, combined with a lack of accurate information on the great civilizations of Asia, gave rise to European artworks which reflect, not the real world of Asia, but European fantasies of the civilizations of China, Japan and India. With its origins in the seventeenth century, Chinoiserie in Europe reached its climax in the mid-eighteenth century where it informed some of the most delightful and beautiful artistic productions of the period.
Drawing mainly from the NGV Collection, Chinoiserie will showcase European Chinoiserie in a range of media including ceramics, furniture, glass, textiles, painting, prints and drawings. These creations will be placed with examples of Asian art which illustrate both the inspiration for the European productions and how these works depart from their Asian models.
Ricky Swallow: The Bricoleur brings together recent sculpture created since 2004, as well as several groups of watercolours, all of which reveal the artist’s keen interest in making the mundane and the profound.
Renowned for his expertly crafted wooden sculptures that bring to mind the still life tradition, Swallow’s work underscores how memory, longing, and the passage of time are distilled within the humble objects of daily life.
Ricky Swallow is the artist’s first major exhibition in Australia since 2006. Swallow (born 1974, San Remo, Victoria, Australia) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.
In 1969, the newly established Department of Photography acquired its first photograph for the permanent collection. With a collection numbering over 15,000 international and Australian photographs, it is timely to ‘re-view’ what has been achieved.
This exhibition will draw 40 of the highlights of the collection to show the richness and diversity of photographic practice. Selected from each decade of the medium’s history from the 1840s onwards, this exhibition shows the evolution of this unique art form through some of its best loved and most remarkable images.
The Ömie, a small tribe of less than 2000 people, live on the steep south-eastern slopes of Mount Lamington in Papua New Guinea.
Wisdom of the Mountain: Art of the Ömie will comprise of approximately thirty of the finest examples of Ömie bark cloth.
Revealing the beauty and spiritual inwardness of designs from nature, this exhibition will show the dynamism of this great art form. Enabling the viewer to study the work of eight individual Ömie women artists, this exhibition will defy commonly held misconceptions that the Oceanic artist is anonymous and male.
This exhibition, drawn from the NGV Collection, will feature fashion, sculpture, painting, decorative arts and photography to explore the practice of draping cloth on the body.
In classical Greece and Rome, the wearing of uncut cloth was developed into a complex art of wrapping and tying. In the late nineteenth century, the structured nature of women's fashion was relieved by the draping of cloth over crinolines and bustles.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Madeleine Vionnet used the bias cut with her innovative methods of construction to create new prototypes. Contemporary designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan have created works that reference the history of drape while extending the boundaries of fashion.
This exhibition will present a group of major works by Australian-born, London-based artist Ron Mueck. Drawn from Australian and international collections these include: Mask II 2001/02, Man in a boat 2002, Old woman in bed 2000/02, Wild man 2005, Two women 2005 and In bed 2005.
Presenting up to 15 works, this will be the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Mueck’s work to be mounted in Australia. In addition to these there will be a number of new works created specifically for this exhibition.
Love, loss and intimacy is an exhibition of over sixty drawings and prints from the NGV Collection, including works by international and Australian artists from the 18th century through to contemporary art.
The immediacy of drawing has the ability to convey the intimate connection between artist and subject, especially when the sitter is a family member.
Love, Loss and Intimacy will explore how stylistically influential a sitter can be, the poignant loss of a child is evident in Max Klinger’s sketch of his one-day old daughter while the contoured flesh of Edward Burne-Jones’ model Antonia Cavia suggests the trust that develops in the quiet seclusion of the artist’s studio.
The word ‘collage’ comes from the French word coller, to glue, and describes the act of gluing or attaching paper, fabric, natural objects and ephemera to enhance or create a work of art. As a creative process, collage blossomed during the 20th century.
Widely used by Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and Pop artists, collage has been prevalent in Australian art since the 1930s. Selected from the NGV Collection, this exhibition looks at how and why artists have chosen to use this technique, both as a final product and as a step in the creative practice.
The exhibition will include the work of Sidney Nolan, James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Mike Brown, Elizabeth Gower, Katherine Hattam, Nick Mangan, Brook Andrew and many others.
In 2010 the National Gallery of Victoria will present a major retrospective of the work of Rupert Bunny. Organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and curated by Dr Deborah Edwards the exhibition will include approximately 80 paintings and 20 drawings and monotypes borrowed from public, private and corporate galleries and collections in Australia, England and France.
Throughout his long and prolific career, Bunny’s work was receptive to the major progressive artistic trends in French art and to a lesser extent in British art of the period. He engaged with many late 19th century tendencies; Symbolism, Japonaiserie, late pre-Raphaelitism, Orientalism, Impressionism, Fauvism and the influence of Cézanne to create works which range from large mythological works, religious works, portraits, landscapes, decorative allegories and intimate ‘Belle Epoque’ scenes
The first major exhibition of Bunny’s work since 1991, Rupert Bunny will be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria and the AGNSW.
The most distinctive, and much loved, quality of photography is its ability to capture a moment in time – a split second of action or a fleeting glance that can never be replicated in quite the same way.
This sense of the momentary is particularly poignant with portraiture and many critics have commented that a photograph is a kind of ‘momento mori’ which reminds us of the cycle of life and death.
Timelines: Photography and Time will explore three thematic groups: ‘life-times’ (in which portraits from birth to death are shown); ‘seasonal time’ (which features the human relationship to the seasons of nature); and ‘marking time’ (a conceptual approach to the meaning and transcription of time).
Fashion has played a vital role in Australia since first European settlement. Whether reflecting status and position in a newly formed society, or exhibiting new found wealth and flamboyance, the language of fashion was of the utmost importance for the burgeoning Australian society.
In response to the needs of this growing society, tailors and dressmakers established well patronised businesses, and extensive drapers and department stores were founded, such as Farmer and Co in Sydney and Buckley & Nunn in Melbourne. By the early 20th century, independent fashion houses, such as G H V Thomas and Lucy Secor began to make their mark on an Australian fashion scene.
Drawing from the NGV’s Collection of Australian Fashion and Textiles, Australian Made: 100 Years of Fashion will look at the rise fashion in Australia from the 1850s to 1950s.
The exhibition will include some rare early examples of labelled garments from the mid 19th century and a range of dresses, tailored items and accessories that were made and retailed in Australia during this period.
In 2010, European Masters: Städel Collection 19th – 20th Centuries will be the seventh in the NGV’s popular Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series. This is the first time this collection of works has travelled outside Europe and it will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for art lovers.
The exhibition will be drawn from the collection of one of Europe’s finest and most respected museums, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and will present a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time through the works of over 70 artists. These movements include Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Symbolism, German Expressionism and Modernism.
The exhibition begins with romantic German and French paintings of the early 19th century, presents outstanding Impressionist masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, and continues with important paintings and sculptures by a wide range of artists including Max Beckman, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin.
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