Page 56-57 - Annual Review 2009

Reveal
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Reveal
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Selected exhibitions and
displays from the Collection
This year, audiences were presented with
a significant group of Collection exhibitions
which explored and interpreted the depth of
the Gallery’s holdings.
Australian Collection, QAG
This much-anticipated new display presents
Australian art dating from European exploration
and occupation to the 1970s. Painting, prints,
photography, sculpture, ceramics and furniture
are presented in six magnificently refurbished
rooms. The galleries are roughly chronological,
but the display reveals the multiple and
sometimes contradictory stories in the history
of Australian art. Far from one grand narrative,
this history reveals different perspectives,
personalities, cities and landscapes, and
also integrates significant works from the
Indigenous Australian collection.
Highlights include new acquisitions, evocative
symbolist paintings, works from the immensely
popular Heidelberg School, postwar painting
and sculpture, and early Papunya paintings.
Significant Queensland stories are also
presented, with a selection from the Gallery’s
important holdings of Ian Fairweather paintings
and works by Sidney Nolan, drawing on his
fascination with the story of Eliza Fraser.
Exploring places, people and histories, and even
focusing on the conventions of art itself, the
work of Australian artists is celebrated in these
changing displays.
View of the Australian galleries, framed by Robert Klippel’s sculpture
No. 247 Metal construction 1965–68 / Background: selected paintings
by Ian Fairweather.
Top right: View of colonial work in the Australian galleries, including the
‘double-ended sofa’ c.1830–40 by an unknown Tasmanian cabinetmaker
(centre) and the Hunt and Roskell Presentation vase 1864 (far right).
An important work by British painter Matthew
Smith was generously gifted to the international
collection by longstanding supporter Philip
Bacon, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation. Tulips exemplifies a fertile and
successful period of the artist’s career — a
period which established him as an outstanding
colourist among British painters. Tulips was
shown soon after its acquisition, in a new
hang of the international collection at the
Queensland Art Gallery.
Several other British paintings were part of
a group of works gifted to the collection by
Professor Lawrence Hirst and Dr Geoffrey
Hirst, through the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation. Two small studies by Walter
Sickert, Mr Sheepshanks’s house c.1918 and The
bridle path (Pulteney Bridge) c.1918, painted in
Bath, England, added to Sickert’s profile within
the Collection.
Matthew Smith / Tulips c.1925 / Oil on canvas / Gift of Philip Bacon, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation 2009. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program