Power to the People

This is the second occasion that the National Gallery of Victoria has honoured Mike Brown with an exhibition. The first was the major survey exhibition, Embracing Chaos, in December 1977 – February 1978, curated by Jennifer Phipps. That exhibition was also in the nature of a retrospective and took place at a time when Brown had emerged from a decade of notoriety not only as an artist prepared to challenge the establishes values of the Australian art world, but also, to his cost, the attitudes of Australian authority towards censorship in the arts during the 1960s. From the perspective now of over three decades, their current retrospective exhibition of 68 works spanning the years 1958 – 1991 affords us the opportunity of a more complete evaluation of a body of work that occupies a unique position within the development of Australian art as it has shifted in its orientation from modernism to an alternative framework of the postmodern.

Sourced from: Power to the People: The art of Mike Brown, National Gallery of Victoria, 1995