Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
4 December 2008 - 1 March 2009
Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, the first exhibition in the temporary exhibition spaces of the new National Portrait Gallery, is about people and place. Australian art is full of rich expressions of ideas and feeling about the landscape. This exhibition, with its evocative works drawn from public and private collections across Australia, invites visitors to reflect on what places mean to people, and on how our views of ourselves are shaped by place. Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape has been organised by the National Portrait Gallery and curated by Andrew Sayers with Dr Sarah Engledow and Wally Caruana.
We all have relationships with specific places and in many ways these relationships define us. Open Air explores many dimensions of these relationships as they have been expressed in art. Including paintings, photographs, bark paintings and sculpture, the exhibition brings together the works of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists whose work incorporates deep personal responses to the land. It reveals the importance of land in Indigenous self-definition; the engagement of landscape and historical figures (such as Daisy Bates and Burke and Wills); landscapes of alienation; landscapes with significant family associations and art in which the idea of ‘presence’ is fundamental.
The exhibition includes conventional portraits as well as opening up a new and distinctly Australian way of looking at portraiture; it goes beyond a definition of a portrait simply as ‘a picture of a face’, to embrace representations of the order of nature and of ancestral stories within the landscape. The exhibition includes the work of some of the major Australian artists of the twentieth century and the present: Mawalan, Wandjuk and Banduk Marika, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Tim Johnson, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Bea Maddock and Russell Drysdale.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600
