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

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium @ LACMA, Getty Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney...

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium 
LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
March 20 - July 31, 2016
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 
March 15 - July 31, 2016 
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
September 10, 2016 - January 15, 2017 
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 
October 28, 2017 - February 4, 2018

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 

Gelatin silver print

Promised gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust 

and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, a major retrospective examining the work and career of one of the most influential visual artists of the 20th century. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is co-organized by LACMA and the J. Paul Getty Museum. In a historic collaboration, the two institutions will trace the artist’s working methods and materials, presenting the improvisational, experimental aspects of his practice alongside the refined perfection of his prints. The works on display provide new context for understanding the key genres that Mapplethorpe pursued: portraiture, the nude, and still life. His personal connections to sitters, his ability to manage a  successful studio, and his ambition to elevate photography to the status of contemporary art will be demonstrated through rarely seen correspondence, books, and other ephemera, including those from the artist’s archive held by the Getty Research Institute. 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1980 

Gelatin silver print

Promised gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust 

and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

LACMA’s presentation (March 20–July 31, 2016) focuses on Mapplethorpe’s working methods, sources, and creative processes—the experimental and performative aspects of his work—while the J. Paul Getty Museum (March 15–July 31, 2016) highlights the artist’s disciplined studio practice, figure studies, and legacy. Between the two museums, more than 300 works by Mapplethorpe will be on view, making this one of the largest-ever presentations of his work. The objects on view in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium are drawn almost entirely from the landmark joint acquisition of art and archival materials made in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Trust and LACMA from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, 1978 

Gelatin silver print

Promised gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust 

and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

"4 years ago LACMA and the Getty came together to jointly acquire the art and archives of Robert Mapplethorpe," said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. "It has been an exciting collaboration ever since, as our researchers, conservators, and curators have all spent time with this trove of Mapplethorpe's art. Now, we are glad to present this large-scale joint exhibition to Los Angeles and the world."

“Through this historic collaboration, the LACMA and J. Paul Getty Museum exhibitions offer a new perspective on this influential artist,” said Britt Salvesen, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography department. “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium reveals the rich resources of the Mapplethorpe archive, which provides a broader context for the iconic images that brought him fame. Mapplethorpe’s refined style challenged viewers to consider his portraits, flowers, and sexually explicit images as equal expressions of a personal vision. His drive to capture the perfect moment is the core of his art.”

Following its Los Angeles debut, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium will travel internationally beginning with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada (September 10, 2016–January 15, 2017), the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, (October 28, 2017–February 4, 2018), and another international venue. This will be the first major traveling retrospective in North America since the landmark exhibition The Perfect Moment, organized in 1988 by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated book, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs, co-published by LACMA and the J. Paul Getty Museum. A comprehensive guide to the artist's work and career, this publication will feature an introduction by cocurators Britt Salvesen and Paul Martineau, five scholarly essays, an illustrated chronology, and a selected exhibition history and bibliography. The J. Paul Getty Museum presentation is curated by Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs.

Exhibition Organization

The LACMA presentation is organized in five thematic sections. The first gallery establishes Mapplethorpe in the milieu of 1970s and 1980s urban gay culture, depicting himself and his models openly declaring their sexuality through clothing, body adornment, and gesture. The second gallery highlights the work Mapplethorpe created in the late 1960s and early 1970s before he took up photography in earnest. As a student of graphic design at the Pratt Institute, he demonstrated an early facility for draftsmanship and a penchant for geometric composition. He designed jewelry and temporary assemblages using items of clothing. Inspired by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, he also experimented with collages and constructions, often incorporating Catholic iconography and appropriated imagery from homosexual periodicals.

Robert Mapplethorpe borrowed a Polaroid camera from a friend in 1970 and, over the course of the next year, honed his vision as a photographer. These early unique images, installed in the third gallery, reveal his observational acuity and his ability to be in the moment. Mapplethorpe was one of his own best subjects, as his many self-portraits attest, and he was open about being a participant in the scenarios he depicted. The fourth gallery focuses on Mapplethorpe’s engagement with the leather and bondage community, his appropriation of pornographic source material, and his exploration of the African American male nude. Additionally, this gallery features ephemera relating to Robert Mapplethorpe’s first breakout exhibitions in New York, including a joint exhibition at The Kitchen and Holly Solomon Gallery in 1977. The fifth gallery presents work from the mid-1980s, when Mapplethorpe was running a successful studio and producing many commissioned portraits. Among his favorite subjects were the artists, musicians, and other performers he first encountered in the downtown art scene in the ’70s. He commented that photography was “the perfect medium for the 70s and 80s, when everything was fast. If I were to make something that took two weeks to do, I’d lose my enthusiasm. It would become an act of labor and the love would be gone.” 

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium: Exhibition Highlights

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait (1980)

Robert Mapplethorpe’s turn to photography in the early 1970s coincided with his embrace of New York’s leather subculture, and, throughout the decade, he explored the potential of both forms of expression simultaneously. His 1980 self-portrait as a surly, smoking leatherman captures the hyper masculine posturing that was concomitant with the choice of leather as a fashion statement and as a sexual fetish. Staring defiantly into the camera, Robert Mapplethorpe declares his participation in the leather community. At the same time, the photograph expresses the playful and performative aspects of his studio practice. An element of dress-up and theater is evident in much of his portraiture. This self-portrait shows the artist posing in the role of an archetypal tough-guy—a greaser complete with popped collar, a lit cigarette dangling from his lip, and hair styled into a pompadour. 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith (1978)

Robert Mapplethorpe was studying art at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, when he met Patti Smith in spring 1967. Mapplethorpe and Smith spent the next decade in close proximity, inspiring one another's artistic aspirations. Mapplethorpe chose photography as his medium in the early 1970s, whereas Smith gravitated toward poetry and music, and the two collaborated in a number of portrait sessions. Here, Smith poses in the act of cutting her hair, a gesture of defiance. As she explained in a 1975 interview, she didn't "want to walk around New York looking like a folk-singer. I like rock 'n' roll. So I got hundreds of pictures of Keith Richards, and I hung them up and then just took scissors and chopped away until I had a real Rolling Stones haircut." Mapplethorpe captured Smith's androgynous style, composing the photograph to emphasize contrasts of black and white in Smith's features and wardrobe, in the background, and even in the cat.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon (1982)

Robert Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon at a party in 1979, and he would go on to produce nearly 200 photographs of her over the next several years. The first woman to win the International Federation of Body Builders female competition, Lyon had an androgynous, muscular physique that appealed to Mapplethorpe’s interest in the sculptural body. “I’d never seen anybody that looked like that before,” he said. “Once she took her clothes off it was like seeing something from another planet.” The pinnacle of their collaboration came with the release of the book Lady (1983), a series of portraits of Lyon. In this portrait, Mapplethorpe captures Lyon in her work-out attire, a nod to her role as an early advocate for fitness and weight training, which came to be a defining feature of early and mid-1980s American culture. 

Complementary Exhibition

The LACMA exhibition will also be accompanied by the installation Physical: Sex and the Body in the 1980s, which will feature roughly 30 works from the museum’s permanent collection. Placing Robert Mapplethorpe’s work in dialogue with his contemporaries, the installation examines the cultural and artistic upheavals of a pivotal decade in the history of American art and society. Featured artists include Bruce Weber, Kiki Smith, Sarah Charlesworth, Laura Aguilar, and Marina Abramovic, among others. Physical: Sex and the Body is curated by Ryan Linkof, assistant curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography department.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036
www.lacma.org

J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90049
www.getty.edu

Robert Klippel. A Tribute Exhibition at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney - Text by Edmund Capon + Biography

Robert Klippel

A Tribute Exhibition to Australia's Greatest Sculptor

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

9 August - 13 October 2002

When Robert Klippel died in Sydney on his 81st birthday on 19 June last year, the next day’s headlines acclaimed his artistic achievements – ‘Australia’s greatest sculptor’, ‘a sculptor with iconic status’. As early as the 1960s, Robert Hughes was claiming Robert Klippel as an outstanding figure of Australian art and one of few sculptors worthy of international attention.

While Klippel’s sculpture is extolled, he was a man who eschewed publicity, and to the public his name, unlike those of other major Australian art figures such as Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Arthur Boyd amongst others, may not be familiar.

With a career spanning 60 years of prodigious creativity, Robert Klippel worked closely with the Gallery’s curator of Australian art, Deborah Edwards, to present this first full-scale retrospective of his life’s work.

“Robert Klippel was Australia's greatest sculptor and arguably one of the most significant sculptors of his generation internationally. Klippel's particular vision, inspired by the intricacies and the profusion of our natural and man-made environments and by his quest for a spiritually relevant form, stands alone in the history of Australian art,” said Deborah Edwards.

Comprising more than 250 pieces, the exhibition encompasses Klippel’s development from figurative sculpture into abstraction, from Surrealist wood carvings to the extraordinary junk assemblages of the 1960s and 1990s. The diversity of junk materials in Klippel’s art – wood, stone, plastic toy kits, wooden pattern parts, typewriter machinery, industrial piping and machine parts – as well as bronze, silver, oils, photography, collage and paper; and the great range in scale of his work, from intimate whimsical structures in metal to the large wooden assemblages of the 1980s, are all incorporated in the exhibition.

Robert Klippel was a fossicker, and his waterfront home in Balmain a cornucopia of industrial discards. These he pondered and re-assembled into some of the most exciting works of art ever produced in this country. He created an amazing number of collages and works on paper, more than 5,000 – outlines and inspirations for his sculpture – “far too many to ever be realised into sculptures, but wonderful pictorial studies in their own right,” said Deborah Edwards.

To accompany the exhibition, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is publishing a comprehensive monograph and a CD ROM catalogue raisonne. This CD ROM catalogue raisonne is the first produced on an Australian artist, and provides detailed information on more than 1,200 of Klippel’s sculptures.

“Robert Klippel’s indefatigable instinct to make things embraced the realms of fantasy, of imagination and whimsy, but at the same time there is a sturdy reality in all thos reawakened bits and pieces of discarded industry and long lost purpose. These works of surprising contemplation and fascinating intrigue are, for me, perfect testaments to the contribution of Robert Klippel, that independent, somewhat solitary but relentlessly creative spirit.”

Edmund Capon

Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales

ROBERT KLIPPEL: A brief biography

Robert Klippel was born in 1920. At the age of six he made his first model ship after being taken on a ferry ride on Sydney Harbour. Model making became a passion – he was employed to make models of planes while he was serving in the Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships at the Gunnery Instruction Centre during World War II. While working at the Centre he was able to attend evening classes at East Sydney Technical College and, after his discharge, was able to attend for a full year.

His parents’ business was successful and with their support, he left Australia for the Slade College in London – a 6 month experience which did not satisfy his need for freedom of expression. However, in London he met the Australian painter and art critic, James Gleeson, with whom he formed a life-long friendship. In November 1948 Klippel, Gleeson and the young Lucian Freud exhibited together in London. André Breton, the originator of Surrealism, arranged for Klippel’s work to be exhibited in Paris the following year. After 18 months in Paris, Robert Klippel returned to Australia.

Australia was culturally dismal in the 1950s, and Robert Klippel's first sculptural work was not sold in this country until 1956. Nor could the artist achieve any commercial success in a short-lived career as an industrial designer. In 1957 he set sail for America, where he remained until 1963, teaching sculpture at the Minneapolis School of Art from 1958-1962. Living in New York in 1957 (and again in 1962-63) Klippel became attuned to the paintings and sculptures of the 'New York' school, and produced his first junk assemblages in 1960, using various parts and sections from old machinery (such as typewriters and cash registers). With these works he subsequently established his mature reputation as a radical new voice in Australian art, after he returned to Sydney in mid-1963.

Living in a huge old house in Birchgrove from 1968, Robert Klippel consolidated his vision and also became, by the 1970s, one of the country's most important collagists. In decades during the 1970s and 80s, when the traditional distinctions between sculpture and architecture, design, photography, performance and painting were frequently presented as obsolete, Klippel's belief in his sculpture was a commitment to the traditional, imaginative concerns of his art. He remained committed to the idea of sculpture as abstract, as occupying sculptural space, and as sustaining in ways beyond any literary or narrative function. In the 1980s he completed a series of spectacular small bronzes, as well as a large number of monumental wooden assemblages, made from the pattern-parts of early twentieth century maritime machinery.

Robert Klippel's last decades proved extremely prolific. Working with wood, metals, plastics, junk, machinery parts, oils, watercolours and paper, and utilising the techniques of casting, assemblage, painting and collage, he had completed over 1,200 sculptures by the end of the 1990s. His independence of thought continued to mark his creative life, as did the exceptional fertility and suppleness of his sculptural imagination, until his death, during his last major exhibition of work, in June 2001.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Art Gallery Road, Sydney

www.agnsw.com.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