Margel Hinder @ Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney & Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen - Modern in Motion

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

30 January – 2 May 2021

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen

30 June – 10 October 2021

MARGEL HINDER 

Revolving construction 1957

Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1959 

© AGNSW

The Art Gallery of New South Wales presents Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion, the first retrospective of one of Australia’s most important and dynamic, yet underrated, modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, showcases an arresting array of sculptures by Margel Hinder (1905 – 1995) produced over five decades of her career.

From the solidity and volume of her wood carvings in the 1930s, to the ‘space age’ kinetic and wire works of the 1950s and her major public commissions in the 1960s, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion traces the development of Margel Hinder’s creative vision and her exploration of sculptural languages.

Art Gallery of NSW director Dr Michael Brand said the exhibition aims to rectify Margel Hinder’s profile as one of the most underestimated Australian sculptors of the 20th century.

“Margel Hinder was an agent for cultural change and part of the first generation of abstract artists in Australia. This important retrospective reveals how vital Hinder was in the making of Sydney’s modernism and for asserting the place of sculpture within it,” Brand said.

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion is co-curated by Art Gallery of NSW senior curator of Australian art Denise Mimmocchi and Heide Museum of Modern Art artistic director Lesley Harding.

Lesley Harding said the exhibition uncovers the expansive nature of Margel Hinder’s creativity, and her skill in giving sculptural form to universal concepts like time and motion in materials expressive of the era.

“Apart from her inclusion in a few surveys of local modernism, Hinder’s vanguard practice and its legacy have largely been overlooked since the 1980s. This exhibition presents her innovative and visually arresting sculpture to new generations and the wide audience it deserves.”

Denise Mimmocchi said the exhibition is an opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of Hinder’s oeuvre.

“Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion brings together major sculptures from public and private collections, immersive representations of public sculptures, maquettes, drawings and archival photographs to present an insightful portrait of the pioneering sculptor’s life and work.”

“The Art Gallery of NSW has a substantial collection of Hinder’s maquettes that reveal incredible details of her creative processes. We are excited to have recently completed conservation on more than 40 of these maquettes so that they can be exhibited,” said Denise Mimmocchi.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Margel Hinder (née Harris) initiated her sculpture studies in Buffalo and Boston. She migrated to Australia in 1934, following her marriage to Australian artist Frank Hinder, where her mature practice flourished.

Exhibition highlights include Margel Hinder’s commanding kinetic works, whose slow rotations encapsulate a sense of the world in perpetual motion, and an immersive installation based on two of Hinder’s major public sculptures.

Created by environment designer and 3D artist Andrew Yip, the life-size digital reconstructions are of two of the most significant public sculptures of Hinder’s career: the Civic Park fountain, Newcastle 1961–66 and the now decommissioned Northpoint fountain 1975. This project allows for a presence of this important component of Hinder’s art within the context of her retrospective while also demonstrating the dramatic shift in the style and scope of Hinder’s art in monumental and water kinetic sculpture.

The exhibition is accompanied by the richly illustrated publication Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion featuring essays by Denise Mimmocchi; Lesley Harding; Art Gallery of NSW object conservator Melanie Barrett; and Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University assistant professor of immersive media, Dr Andrew Yip; and a foreword by University of Oxford professor of the history of art Dr Geoffrey Batchen.

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion is presented at the Art Gallery of NSW and will tour to Heide Museum of Modern Art.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

HEIDE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen VIC 3105

www.heide.com.au

The photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

The photograph and Australia
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
21 March - 8 June 2015 
Queensland Art Gallery
June - September 2015

DAVID MOORE

Migrants arriving in Sydney 1966 

Gelatin silver photograph 

Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of the artist 1997 

© Lisa, Karen, Michael and Matthew Moore

The photograph and Australia at the Art Gallery of NSW is the largest exhibition of Australian photography held since 1988 that borrows from collections nationwide and looks at the history of the medium.

Reflecting an evolving image of Australia from the 1840s until today, The photograph and Australia presents more than 400 photographs by more than 120 artists, including Morton Allport, Richard Daintree, Paul Foelsche, Samuel Sweet, JJ Dwyer, Charles Bayliss, Frank Hurley, Harold Cazneaux, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Sue Ford, Carol Jerrems, Tracey Moffatt, Robyn Stacey, Ricky Maynard, Anne Ferran and Patrick Pound.

The works of renowned artists and those considered to be national icons are shown alongside those by unknown photographers and everyday material, such as domestic albums and postcards. The photographs in this exhibition tell people’s stories, illustrate where and how they lived, and communicate official public narratives. Scientific photography such as the earliest Australian X-rays and astronomical photographs appear alongside contemporary representations of people and place.

Sourced from more than 35 private and public collections across Australia, England and New Zealand, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the State Library of Victoria, The photograph and Australia uncovers hidden gems dating from 1845 until now.

From mass media’s evolution in the 19th century to today’s digital revolution, The photograph and Australia investigates how photography has been harnessed to create the idea of a nation and reveals how our view of the world, ourselves and each other has been changed by the advent of photography.

It also explores how photography operates aesthetically, technically, politically and in terms of distribution and proliferation, in the Australian context. Highlights include works by Australia’s first professional photographer, George Goodman and recent works by Simryn Gill.

Curated from a contemporary perspective, the exhibition takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach looking at four interrelated areas: Aboriginal and settler relations; exploration: mining, landscape and stars; portraiture and engagement; collecting and distributing photography.

Exhibition curator, Judy Annear, senior curator, photographs, Art Gallery of NSW, said: ‘We are proud to present The photograph and Australia, an exhibition that considers how the photograph invented modern Australia.

Audiences are invited to experience the richness of Australian photography, past and present, and the sense of wonder the photograph can still induce through its ability to capture both things of the world and the imagination.’

Director Michael Brand stated: ‘We hope that The photograph and Australia will contribute to an understanding of the richness and complexity of the medium and provide impetus for further explorations of the photograph’s production, function and dissemination in this country. We trust that in doing so, it will also help place Australian photography in a broader international context.’

A richly illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, reflecting the exhibition themes and investigating how Australia itself has been shaped by photography.

There will be related education programs, digital resources, a substantial film program and live events. A major symposium will also be held at the Art Gallery of NSW on 18 April addressing the proliferation and distribution of photographic images.

The photograph and Australia will be open to the public at the Art Gallery of NSW in the major exhibition gallery from 21 March to 8 June 2015, before travelling to the Queensland Art Gallery, where it will be open to the public from June to September 2015.

Art Gallery of NSW - Sydney - Australia
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2013, Sydney, Australia

Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2013, The space between us

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Through 28 July 2013

THE ANNE LANDA AWARD was the first acquisitive award in Australia to focus on moving image and practices and the application of new technologies to contemporary art. Established in 2004, in honour of Anne Landa, a former trustee of the gallery who embraced challenging art and ideas, the award is a vital platform for presenting and supporting dynamic, exploratory work that is exemplary in this area. The participating artists are eligible for the acquisitive award of $25,000, which sees the winning work enter the Gallery’s collection. Previous winners include: David Rosetzky 2004/5, Monika Tichacek 2006/7, TV Moore 2009, and David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, 2011.

JAMES NEWITT 

Say it like you want it, 2012, production still 

Image courtesy and © the artist

The exhibition The space between us considers the interrelation of video and performance. The fifth in the biennial Anne Landa Award series, this year’s edition is guest-curated by Charlotte Day, Director, Monash University Museum of Art, and features the work of artists Lauren Brincat, Alicia Frankovich, Laresa Kosloff, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Mitchell, James Newitt and Christian Thompson.

The seven artists are connected through their interest in the artist as performing body, the artist as creator/director of performances, and the viewer’s role in relation to the works and as active participant. This resurgence in performative art continues out of a desire to question and test established exhibition and viewing habits, as well as the relative distinctions and distances between artist, artwork and audience, said Charlotte Day.

The exhibition incorporates many live as well as documented performances; visitors may experience tambourine players, women on horseback, groups of people testing their physical endurance and other unexpected encounters in the vicinity of the Gallery.

A digital publication has been produced in association with the exhibition. This publication is available via an app for iPad and include essays, documentation of exhibited works, video, audio and other interactive features.

THE ARTISTS

Sydney-based Lauren Brincat recent work High Horse 2012 is a video recording of an endurance performance in which the artist stood on top of a horse in a pose inspired by a statue of Joan of Arc she saw in Paris. For this exhibition, Brincat will also direct two live performances involving women on horseback riding to the Gallery and 50 people playing tambourines in the Gallery’s entrance court.

Berlin-based Alicia Frankovich appropriates movements and gestures from sport, dance, art history and cinema in her performances, video documentation and sculptural installations. Part of her work in this exhibition is a performance involving a group of joggers, directed by Frankovich in the Gallery’s entrance court.

In her new work, Melbourne-based Laresa Kosloff has filmed viewers in the grand courts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Kosloff’s project reconsiders who is the subject and what is the object of art and re-establishes the potential for participation and performance in the Gallery.

The four-screen video of Paris-based Angelica Mesiti records diverse performers who in the Western cities they now live in each maintain ties with their birthplace through rhythm, sounds and music. This ambitious video project reflects on deep and powerful memories of the performers and how experience may flow from the inner body into the social space of the community.

Sydney-based Kate Mitchell presents a new work in which she smashes through a series of coloured glass panes, creating a video installation that showcases her interest in performing stunts and pushing herself beyond her comfort zone.

A new video by Lisbon-based James Newitt, made during a residency in Liverpool, UK, shows the evolving dynamic between two opposing groups of volunteers whom he brought together to enact a protest rally.

Oxford-based Christian Thompson employs his father’s Bidjara language, taking the word for the bullroarer, djuldibha, to create an immersive and meditative soundscape of both language and the sound and rhythm of an ancient technology designed to communicate over great distances.

ART GALLERY NSW, SYDNEY

Art gallery's website: www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Rosalie Gascoigne, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
14 November 1997 - 11 January 1998

In 1974 Rosalie Gascoigne had her first art exhibition. In 1994, just 20 years later, she was awarded an AM for service to the arts, particularly as a sculptor. Now, at 80 years of age, her work is represented in all Australian state and national galleries and in many overseas collections including the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Material as Landscape is not a retrospective of Rosalie Gascoigne's career but an exhibition which focuses specifically on Gascoigne's relationship with the natural environment and the ways in which Rosalie Gascoigne expresses rather than describes, nature and the landscape in her work. The exhibition will include approximately thirty works ranging from the late 1970s to the present day, including a number of her major works.

A fully-colour illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by James Mollison and Deborah Edwards, Curator of the exhibition.

Rosalie Gascoigne settled in Australia in 1943 when she joined her astronomer husband at the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in the A.C.T.. It was the artist's response to the landscape of Australia there over 20 years that led her to attend the Japanese Sogetsu School of Ikebana in 1962. Ikebana can well be translated as 'awareness of nature' and Rosalie Gascoigne rapidly mastered this discipline which enriched her appreciation of form and line. Not to be limited by this tradition, she began collecting a variety of abandoned and naturally weathered items, during her regular excursions into the landscape around Canberra.

In her work Rosalie Gascoigne uses commonplace objects, often scavenged from the tips and pastures around Canberra, arrranging them with the most minimal of means to create evocative works of great clarity and power. Rosalie Gascoigne's work incorporates both a refined formal sensibility and a poetic inspiration that she finds in the landscape. Everyday objects cease to have a conventional function as they are arranged in such a way that the focus is on them as art objects, with their own inherent qualities and meaning. " I try to provide a starting point from which people can let their imagination's wander - what they discover may be the product of their own experience as much as mine," said Rosalie Gascoigne.

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney NSW 2000
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

David Moore, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

David Moore: the unseen images
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
7 November 1997 - 18 January 1998

David Moore is Australia's most significant living photographer. This exhibition celebrates his 70th year. David Moore's career was forged at the high point of international photojournalism. He was assigned by Life, Time, Fortune and The New York Times in the U.S. and The Observer in the U.K.. He photographed the building of the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s and the Glebe Island Bridge in the 1990s. He has worked in many parts of the world and published eight books of photographs.

David Moore's accumulated archives now amount to more than 200,000 images. The breadth and depth of his working life, over 50 years, has produced an extraordinary collection of material which documents facets of life in Australia and the United States as well as events in Britain.

This exhibition consists of a selection of 87 photographs that have not been seen before by the public. They represent a wide variety of David Moore's working life. Included are pictures of politicians and artists, people in remote regions, urban design, landscape, the rich fabric of daily life and personal observations which illustrate a continued search for expression and communication. A fully illustrated catalogue published by Chapter & Verse accompanies the exhibition. David Moore and Judy Annear, Curator of the exhibition, will discuss the unseen images on Friday 14 November within the show.

There is a thread which joins these photographs regardless of whether they are black & white or colour, or whether they were taken in the 1950s or forty years later - it is the photographer's ongoing fascination with the structure of the image within the frame: its geometry, and, within that geometry, the relationship between all the elements depicted, no matter how small they may be.

David David Moore's modernist stance in photography is the overriding aspect of this exhibition. From a very early stage in his career the impulse to formalism and abstraction in his work is quite clear. While there are images of spontaneity and intimacy in some of the early photographs, it is in the patterns of light and shade over form, particularly architectural and natural from, which becomes paramount in his work.

David Moore has been instrumental in advancing Australian photography throughout his career and in the early 1970s was instrumental in setting up the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. In 1994 he was awarded an Australian Artists' Creative Fellowship. He has exhibited in London, Paris, China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, as well as throughout Australia. His work is included in major collections throughout the world, for example, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, le Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C..

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney NSW 2000
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale - Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson: Fluent

Australia at the 1997 Venice Biennale

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson: Fluent

17 June - 9 November 1997

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson's representation in the 47th Venice Biennale is the first time Aboriginal women have been exhibited at the most prestigious international event in the visual art world's calendar.

"Like the many canals that weave through Venice, the exhibition explores the subtle connections between works which suggest a continuous ebb and flow between modernity and tradition, art and craft, painting and sculpture, abstraction and narrative. fluent celebrates and pays tribute to the survival of Aboriginal culture on the international stage, reflecting the culture and creativity of both regional and urban communities." (Curatorium)

The title, fluent, not only suggests the visual fluidity of the artists' works and the intuitive nature of their creation, it also connotes the oral traditions of Aboriginal culture and the many languages that make up Aboriginal Australia.

Kwementyai Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson create individual, bold and contemporary interpretations of a heritage that is 40,000 years old. These artists exemplify the challenging and innovative direction both urban and regional Aboriginal art has taken in the past decade.

KWEMENTYAI KNGWARREYE passed away last year and was believed to be in her eighties. In accordance with Aboriginal custon, the full name of the artist is not written or spoken out of respect for the deceased and their family. The substitute Kwementyai (meaning 'no name') and the artist's skin name, Kngwarreye, is used.

Kngwarreye is considered to be one of the most significant of Australia's contemporary artists. Her work is represented in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas. In 1992, she was the first Aboriginal artist to be awarded an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship. Kngwarreye lived a traditional lifestyle and worked on a cattle station in the outback of Australia in her youth. After a lifetime of traditional cultural practice, Kngwarreye was introduced to non-traditional art practices in her late sixties. Initially working with batik, it was not until over a decade later that Kngwarreye found the medium she came to master, painting on canvas.

fluent focuses on Kngwarreye's 'stripe' paintings which suddenly appeared in late 1993, disrupting her famous fields of shimmering dots. A spiritual analogy is made between the stripes of her paintings and the traditional body paint of Kngwarreye's awelye, yam dreaming cycles.

YVONNE KOOLMATRIE is recognised as one of the leading weavers in Australia, practising a rare form of Ngarrindjari weaving traditional to the Riverland country of South Australia. Originally intended to exist in the physical world of water, Koolmatrie's weavings are seemingly weightless and reveal the hand of the artist. Made of sedge grass reeds from the River Murray, chosen for their strength, colour and fragrance, Koolmatrie's weavings have an inherent gracefulness and balance which distinguishes her work.

JUDY WATSON, unlike the other two artists, trained in a formal academic system. As a Waanyi artist, Watson has said her work is about "memories washing over me". She regularly travels to her country in North West Queensland (Waanyi country), to draw inspiration from her rich personal and communal histories. Using principles of abstraction she exposes the hidden stories of the Australian colonial experience. The rich deeply textured surfaces, etched with innumerable marks and meanders, are breathtakingly beautiful. Her fluid painting style is enhanced as her unstretched canvasses float on the wall.

Watson has travelled extensively and held international residencies in Banff in Canada, Bhopal in India, Tuscany in Italy, Lillehammer in Norway and New Zealand. She was a recipient of the 1995 Möet & Chandon Fellowship and undertook a one year residency in France.

Australia's 1997 Venice Biennale curatorial team, consisting of curators, Hetti Perkins and Brenda L.Croft and coordinating curator Victoria Lynn, make an ideal blend of professional indigenous and contemporary art expertise.

HETTI PERKINS of the Arrernte people is an independent curator based in Sydney and has worked as a curator of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative and The Art Gallery of New South Wales. BRENDA L. CROFT of the Gurindji people is a practising artist, an independent curator and was General Manager of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. VICTORIA LYNN is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The exhibition fluent has been supported by The Art Gallery of New South Wales. The assistance of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative is gratefully acknowledged. This project has been assisted by the Australia Council, the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body. The support of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commision is also acknowledged.

MICHAEL LYNCH, General Manager of the Australia Council, is the Commissioner for the Australian Pavilion.

Australia has officially participated in the Venice Biennale since 1954 when an exhibition of Sidney Nolan's work was presented. From 1978 the Australia Council became involved in selecting the artists to be exhibited and commenced funding Australia's participation, securing a site for Australia's own Pavillion in 1988.

THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au