Cartier: The Exhibition @ NGA - National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Cartier: The Exhibition
NGA - National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
March 30 — 22 July, 2018

Cartier Paris

Two crocodile brooches 1975

gold, 1023 brilliant-cut fancy intense yellow diamonds,

two navette-shaped emerald cabochons, 

1060 emeralds, two ruby cabochons

30 cm and 27 cm (l. each)

Collection Cartier © Cartier 

Photo: Nick Welsh

The unmissable Cartier: The Exhibition features more than 300 examples of masterpieces by Cartier, charting the prestigious Paris jewellery house throughout 20th century history. The exhibition provides a window into the intimate world of Cartier’s famous international clients, including royalty, aristocrats and global socialites, to movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor whose platinum, gold and Burmese ruby necklace (1951) is synonymous with the iconic jeweller.

Cartier Paris  

Stomacher brooch 1907

platinum, one pear-shaped sapphire,

seven cushion-shaped sapphires,

round old- and rose-cut diamonds,

millegrain setting

21 x 13 cm 

Collection Cartier © Cartier 

Photo: Vincent Wulveryck

The exclusive exhibition features pieces from turn-of-the-century opera star Dame Nellie Melba—Australia’s first global superstar—who was a major client of the Maison Cartier, which supplied other incredibly intricate ‘garland-style’ jewellery popular with European aristocracy.

Cartier Paris 

Brooch 1907

platinum, round old- and rose-cut diamonds, 

millegrain setting

3.8 x 3.8 cm 

Collection Cartier © Cartier 

Photo: Vincent Wulveryck

Art Deco swept the world in the 1920s and Cartier’s designs led the way with its innovative style, such as the Duchess of Windsor’s trend-setting Flamingo brooch (1940) and original ‘It Girl’ DaisyFellowes’ Tutti Frutti necklace (1936). Their spectacular designs took cues from sources around the world: including East Asia, India and Ancient Egypt. Cartier combined these influences into some of their most exotic jewellery designs.

Cartier London 

Rose clip brooch 1938

platinum, baguette-, round-old- and 

single-cut diamonds

7 x 4 cm 

Collection Cartier © Cartier 

Photo: Nick Welsh

During the Age of Glamour of 1930s to 1960s, the social, political and historic events demanded a new approach from the agile Cartier designers. That creativity continued with seminal femme fatale María Félix’s flamboyant Crocodile necklace (1975).

Cartier Paris

Necklace, bracelet and pair of earrings 1951 

platinum, gold, brilliant-, baguette-, 

modified baguette- and fancy-cut diamonds, 

cushion-shaped and round faceted Burmese rubies

37 cm (l. necklace); 6.2 cm (l. bracelet at c.); 

6 cm (l. earrings)

Collection Cartier © Cartier 

Photo: Marian Gérard

Central to the NGA’s Cartier exhibition is a group of beautiful items from the Royal collection, including a selection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s personal favourites. Even the Queen’s Halo Tiara which she leant to Kate Middleton for her wedding to HRH Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, are on display in Canberra.

The exhibition also includes many items that belonged to an array of European monarchs who were amongst Cartier’s most valued clients, including Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco whose 10.48-carat diamond engagement ring (1956) was made by Cartier Paris.

Cartier London  

Halo tiara 1934

platinum, round old- and baguette-cut diamonds

4 cm (height)

Collection Cartier © Cartier

Photo: Nils Herrmann

Cartier is credited with creating the modern wristwatch made popular by some of the world’s leading men. A variety of the Maison Cartier’s iconic watch designs are shown in the context of other ingenious items designed specifically for men. Insight into the inner workings of these intricate, ground-breaking designs is also explored through the workshop space.

The NGA exhibition demonstrates Cartier’s flexibility as it continues to be the purveyor of innovation and style, building a contemporary bridge from its iconic past into the future.

Exhibition organised in association with the Denver Art Museum.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA - NGA

Parkes Place, Parkes, Canberra ACT 2600
nga.gov.au

Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Remix, National Gallery of Australia

Roy Lichtenstein: Pop Remix 
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 
Through 27 January 2014

Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix is the first travelling exhibition from the National Gallery of Australia to focus on the work of this seminal and influential artist. His works stand today as icons of 60s and 70s America with his characteristic comic strip and Benday dot imagery continuing to inspire our visual culture.

“Roy Lichtenstein’s work is instantly recognisable. His bright, brash paintings and prints have entered our cultural consciousness as icons of the Pop Art movement,” said Ron Radford AM, Director, National Gallery of Australia. 

Roy Lichtenstein 

Untitled head I 1970

brass

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1973

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

Roy Lichtenstein’s name is synonymous with Pop Art. As a master of appropriation, he applied a refined strategic approach to his creative energies and constructed his entire body of work following a sophisticated process of image selection, reinterpretation and reissue. Lichtenstein developed a central creative principle that became a potent formula: an ability to identify cultural clichés and to repackage them as monumental remixes. 

Roy Lichtenstein 

A Cherokee brave 1952

woodcut

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gift of Kenneth and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler 2010

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

“Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix traces the artist’s print projects from the 1950s to the 1990s, exploring how the artist appropriated, transformed and ‘remixed’ numerous art historical sources including Claude Monet’s Impressionism, Max Ernst’s Surrealism and de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionism. Lichtenstein reinterpreted the work of these artistic giants and significant art movements using an instantly recognisable graphic aesthetic, effectively ‘branding’ himself with a signature Lichtenstein ‘look’ to secure his place alongside those masters he so admired. Slick, intelligent and humorous, Lichtenstein’s ‘remixes’ of romance and war comics, brushstrokes and nude girls are amongst the best known Pop prints,” said Jaklyn Babington, exhibition curator.

Roy Lichtenstein 

Ten dollar bill 1956

lithograph

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gift of Kenneth and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler 2010

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

This exhibition of 88 multiples and works on paper is drawn from the extensive holdings of Roy Lichtenstein at the National Gallery of Australia, and were produced by the artist over a fifty year period. For more information on the prints in this exhibition go to the NGA’s Kenneth Tyler collection website – a virtual institute for fine art printmaking which provides background context for the prints Lichtenstein created with Tyler at his various print workshops:

www.nga.gov.au/internationalprints/tyler 

Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix was previously on view in Australia at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, VIC, 19 April - 11 June 2012, the QUT Art Museum, Brisbane QLD, 25 June - 26 August 2012, the Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, NT, 16 November 2012 - 20 January 2013.

NGA, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
www.nga.gov.au 

Tony Tuckson, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra - Painting Forever

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

4 November 2000 — 4 February 2001

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson displays in depth the most beautiful and representative paintings and drawings by Australia’s greatest abstract expressionist artist TONY TUCKSON. This is the first major survey exhibition of Tony Tuckson’s work since 1976 and offers a unique opportunity to both discover and reassess one of Australia’s most important twentieth century artists.

The exhibition charts the progression of Tony Tuckson as an artist, from prominent student of naturalist watercolours and post war murals to pre-eminent abstract expressionist. The exhibition explores one of the defining features of 20th century art-the journey towards abstraction. His life’s work is a journey of emotional, intellectual and aesthetic discovery. Painting Forever seeks to balance Tony Tuckson’s most radical, extreme and beautiful late paintings and drawings with early paintings and contextual material to reveal how he became and remained an abstract expressionist artist.

Tony Tuckson’s paintings were usually produced alongside numerous drawings and painted works on paper (including sketchbooks). The exhibition uses this pattern of production as the formal structure of the display. The earliest oil paintings, drawings and watercolours are selectively displayed in a dense ‘domestic’ hang – including art school studies, unframed serial drawings, unstretched experimental oil paintings, family studies, nudes and early nightclub scenes. This domestic hang reiterates both the subject matter of family, service comrades and friends, and the situation in which the works were made.

From this point forward the exhibition alternates groups of ever more abstracted paintings with the best works from Tony Tuckson’s drawn oeuvre. Early 1950s tentative abstraction – led by the radical gouache drawings on newspaper are interspersed with the last of the formal oil paintings. Expressive ‘divisionist’ paintings on composition board open up into a powerful group of the scratchy, delicate masterpieces of the early 1960s. These in turn lead to a great group of red, black and white paintings, including some of his most extreme and compelling gouache-collage drawings.

The exhibition concludes with a whole gallery space devoted to the 1970s ‘veil’ paintings and attenuated charcoal drawings. This display contains some of Tony Tuckson’s greatest and most expressive works of art, including the late diptych’s and previously un-exhibited drawings. The exhibition closes with the great autobiographical masterpieces Grey 1973 and White sketch 1973. It is hoped that the artists many self-portraits (both drawn and painted) provide the binding motif for visitors to the exhibition.

Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson seeks to establish a new audience for this wonderful artist as well as nurturing existing fans. It appeals to younger viewers, through making a virtue of Tony Tuckson’s most radical and expressive works, and by providing a very clear and straightforward contextual insight into the artist and his work.

The national tour of Painting Forever:Tony Tuckson exhibition will commence in late February 2001 following the display in Canberra.

Curator: Tim Fisher

NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA - NGA

Parkes Place, Parkes, Canberra ACT 2600

nga.gov.au

Inside Out: New Chinese Art at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Inside Out: New Chinese Art

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

2 June - 13 August 2000

Inside Out: New Chinese Art is the first major international exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to explore the vitality and dynamic changes in Chinese culture in the late 20th century. The artists in this exhibition have been working in a period when the deeply-rooted cultural assumptions and centuries-old visual traditions are under enormous pressure from rapid modernisation, changing political realities and conflicting global, ethnic and local identities.

The exhibition explores the many ways in which the challenges of recent social, economic and cultural changes have confronted artists in mainland China and the Chinese diaspora - Hong Kong, Taiwan, and those who have emigrated to the West since the late 1980s. Inside Out presents an astonishing body of art - confronting, clever, mysterious, elegant and always thought-provoking - across the widest range of artistic media.

Consisting of nearly 90 works created in the years 1985-1998, Inside Out includes painting, sculpture, photographs, installations, videos and prints by some of the world's leading contemporary artists. The show explores many major themes including the artist's response to the globalisation and the commercialism of contemporary society; the use or rejection of cultural heritage and artistic traditions; and the relationship of the individual to society against the underlying quest for artistic identity, both in China and abroad.

Co-curated by the Asia Society in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition was first shown in late 1998 simultaneously at the Asia Society and P.S.I. Contemporary Art Center in New York. 

Vishakha Desai, Director of the Asia Society Galleries in New York remarked, "These works have been selected to show the explosion of creativity among these artists in the past dozen years or so, and to convey a sense of dynamism in their work - we also hope to break down barriers between audiences of Asian and Western art - this art is Asian but it is also contemporary in an international context."

Huge installations include Xu Bing's famous Book from the Sky, with its elegant play on Chinese literary traditions in the form of nonsensical printed calligraphy. Similar themes inform Gu Wenda's ethereal enclosure, Temple of Heaven (China Monument), constructed of traditional furniture, videos and screens of human hair which also challenged conventional Chinese respect for learning. 

Photography - still and video - is the preferred media of many works in Inside Out. Zhang Huan's To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond plays visual and political games with a host of naked villagers against the luminous blue surface of the pond. Other works allude to traditional Chinese art forms: in Zoon, Huang Chih-yang's grotesque figures appear in ink on hanging paper scrolls, while The Dream of China by Wang Jin creates a shimmering dragon robe from polyvinyl chloride and fishing line.

Pop remains a favourite style with Wang Guangyi's Great Castigation Series targeting the global domination of Coca Cola. Zhang Xiaogang's startling Bloodline: Family Portrait shows a blank-faced Mao-badged couple and child, figuratively and literally linked by lines of blood.

As critics of the show have pointed out "These artists have the courage to say things are changing - how am I going to deal with this?"…"This exhibition offers a promise of insight into the psyche of the awakening giant of modern China." An extensive program of performances, artists' talks, lectures and films accompanies the exhibition.

NGA - NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA

Parkes Place East, Canberra ACT 2600

www.nga.gov.au