International Art News

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011 | Animation: 3:17 minutes, colour, sound, 16:9, ed. 2/8 | Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © Deborah Kelly. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2012

Until 22 July 2012 – Gallery of Modern Art
‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ — the second in the Gallery’s Contemporary Australia exhibition series — celebrates the diversity, energy and innovation of contemporary women artists working in this country today.

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011

This exhibition acknowledges the strong history of work by women artists and recognises the ways that their critical, provocative, unexpected and illuminating contributions have reshaped, and continue to shape, the landscape of contemporary art. It features more than 70 new and recent works, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles, video and performance by 33 artists and collectives, a total of 56 visual artists.

Jennifer Mills | What’s in a name? (detail), 2009–11 | Mixed media on paper 323 drawings, varying dimensions Installed dimensions variable Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Photograph: Natasha Harth

The exhibition also includes Embodied Acts, a program of performative works; the Children’s Art Centre installation art work ‘Fly Away Home’ by Fiona Hall; and a film program curated by renowned Australian producer and critic Margaret Pomeranz, AM.

GOMA

René Magritte | Belgium 1898-1967 | Les marches de l'été ( The summer steps) (detail) 1938 | Oil on canvas 60 x 73 cm | Purchased 1991 | Collection: Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

From June 11th to October 2nd 2011 – The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
GoMA is the exclusive Australian venue for ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’, a landmark exhibition of surrealist works direct from the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The Musée national d’art moderne, housed in Paris’s iconic Centre Pompidou, is one of the world’s best museum collections of modern and contemporary art. Its Surrealism collections are the finest in Europe — and the core of this collection is coming to GoMA. This exhibition presents more than 180 works by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ is an opportunity to see important art works that rarely leave Paris, in an exhibition that will provide a fascinating and comprehensive overview of this important artistic movement.
The exhibition presents a historical overview of Surrealism, charting its evolution from Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; to the readymade objects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s photographs.
Gaining traction in the early 1920s, the movement’s development is explored through the writings of Surrealism’s founder André Breton and key early works by André Masson. Also included is a remarkable selection of paintings and sculptures by surrealists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux.

Film and photography are also represented throughout the exhibition, including films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, René Clair and Man Ray. Important photographic works by Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard also feature. The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism’s influence, and includes major works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell.

Gallery Hours

E Phillips Fox | Loves me, loves me not c.1909 | Gift of Sir J Winthrop Hackett, 1910 | Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth | Photograph: Bo Wong

16 April to 7 August 2011 – Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art
The ‘Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox’ exhibition tells the story of an artistic marriage and partnership, one of the most significant in Australian art. Both were painters of modern life at the turn of the last century, and the exhibition will explore the inflections of life and society in their work, from bustling scenes of markets and beaches, to intimate views of families, women and children.

Born in Australia, Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865–1915) married the English painter Ethel Carrick (1872–1952) in 1905 and, over the next decade, they lived in the centre of Paris, travelling through Europe, North Africa and Australia in search of exotic subjects for their expressive paintings. After Phillips Fox died suddenly in 1915, Carrick continued her career, tirelessly promoted her late husband’s work and continued to thrive on adventurous travel.

The exhibition will include approximately 100 paintings, works on paper and ephemera exploring the artists’ lives, subjects and milieu, drawn from major institutions and private collections across Australia.

Museum Hours

Simryn Gill | Untitled (detail) 1999- | An ongoing series of gouaches on National Geographic magazine pages from the 1970s | 25.5 x 17.8 cm each (image and sheet) | Collection:The artist | Image courtesy: The artist, BREENSPACE, Sydney and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York | © The artist

28 August to 17 October 2010 - Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
The work of Simryn Gill considers questions of place and history, and how they might intersect with personal and collective experience. Born in Singapore in 1959, Gill lives in Sydney and Port Dickson, Malaysia. Using objects, language and photographs, her work conveys a deep interest in material culture and in the ways that meaning can transform and translate into different contexts. Through the reinterpretation or alteration of existing objects, the photographing of specific locations and the forming of collections, Gill contemplates how ideas and meanings are communicated between people, objects and sites.

‘Simryn Gill: Gathering’ explores these ideas through a selection of works from the past five years. The exhibition includes key photographic series such as May 2006, Run, and ‘My own private Angkor’, the book-based installation Paper boats, as well as Garland, a work made from objects collected from beaches in Malaysia and Singapore over almost a decade. Also featured are the two sculptural works Throwback, comprised of truck engine parts formed from various organic materials, and Untitled (interiors), bronze sculptures cast from drought cracks in western New South Wales.

The exhibition also aims to reveal Gill’s interest in methods of display, and in the different ways in which people might experience art works. It contains a selection of books, sketches, collections and experimental pieces from the early 1990s to the present, some produced for exhibitions and others never intended as art. Together, they offer an insight into Simryn Gill’s artistic processes and her interest in art-making as an active engagement with the world

Gallery Hours