[Sydney, 3 April 2018] Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Left: Juan Davila, Love, 1988, Tate and Art Australia (MCA) and Dr Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate, today announced the Museum of acquisition of eight new artworks in their International Joint Acquisition Program for Contemporary Art contemporary Australian art, supported by Qantas. Now in its third year, the partnership Australia, donated through the Australian between Tate, MCA and Qantas continues to enrich both museums’ holdings of Australian art, Government’s Cultural helping Australian artists reach global audiences. Gifts Program by the artist and with the Ranging from an early moment in the history of Australian contemporary art through to recent support of the Qantas Foundation, 2018 work, the depth and diversity of Australian art practice is represented in this third round of acquisitions. It includes works by artists who forged new ground in Australian contemporary art, Right: Maria paving the way for others, through to that of younger artists. Fernanda Cardoso, On the Origins or Art – Actual Size II Maratus The early works of Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Rosalie Gascoigne reveal how everyday Volans Abdomen, readymade materials can be transformed into extraordinary poetic assemblages and sculptures. 2016, Tate and the Museum of Juan Davila’s Love (1988) painting is a prescient commentary on the AIDS crisis as a global Contemporary Art phenomenon, whilst his also acquired massive Yawar Fiesta (1998) explores the impact of colonial Australia, purchased policies on indigenous peoples through satiric intertwining of contemporary politics and art jointly with funds provided by the historical references including European history painting, Latin American modernism, American Qantas Foundation pop and Aboriginal art. 2018
Also included in this round of acquisitions are Blue Reflex (1966), an early painting by Ian Burn, considered one of the key voices in the development of conceptual art in Australia, and Kangaroo Blank, a 1988 painting by Imants Tillers, whose work from the 1980s, along with that of Davila, is part of an international dialogue about appropriation and postmodernism in painting.
To date – halfway through the five-year program – twenty works by twelve artists and artist partnerships have been acquired for the Collections of Tate and MCA, a grouping of artworks
t
which reveal and convey something of the complexities of Australian society, as well as the richness Left: Imants Tillers, of contemporary art practice across the country. Kangaroo Blank, 1988, Tate and Museum of The acquisitions are by artists from a range of cultural backgrounds, including prominent Aboriginal Contemporary Art artists Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett and Judy Watson. These, along with works by Australia, purchased artists such as Juan Davila, Peter Kennedy and John Hughes, Helen Johnson and Imants Tillers, pose jointly with funds provided by the difficult questions about Australian history and society, or in the case of Susan Norrie’s video work Qantas Foundation Transit (2011), focus our attention on international events and their impact upon the ways we think 2018 about the world. Right: Rosalie Gascoigne, Just as significantly, the first three years of the program saw acquisitions across a variety of media, Habitation, 1984, from video through to painting and printmaking, reflecting the expanded material basis of Tate and Museum of contemporary art. Contemporary Art Australia, donated through the MCA Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, comments: “The acquired works are part of an Australian international artistic dialogue, as are the artists – some having been born, lived for significant Government’s Cultural Gifts periods of time, or worked and exhibited extensively outside of Australia. They connect with related Program by Martin experiences represented by other artists internationally, highlighting both the particularities of Gascoigne, and with Australian society and culture, as well as its interconnectedness with global forces.” the support of the Qantas Foundation, 2018 Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, says: “The variety and quality of each year’s joint acquisitions show how successful partnerships like this can be. Working with the MCA has enabled us to learn from their expertise as well as to build on our own. With the support of Qantas, we are beginning to transform the way Tate can represent the exciting contributions made to contemporary art in this region.”
Qantas Group Chief Customer Officer, Vanessa Hudson, concludes: “As Australia’s national carrier, we are extremely proud to support this unique acquisition program that helps showcase the best of Australian art to the world and which also contributes to reshaping the understanding about contemporary Australian art internationally.”
Media images accessible here. Media Contacts: Myriam Conrie. P: (02) 9245 2434 / 0429 572 869. E: [email protected] Stephanie Pirrie. P: (02) 9245 2417 / 0430 517 722. E: [email protected]
About the International Joint Acquisition Program
Made possible through a $2.75 million corporate gift from the Qantas Foundation, this ground-breaking collaboration announced in 2015 is enabling an ambitious five-year joint program through which a range of major artworks by contemporary Australian artists will be acquired for the collections of MCA and Tate, owned and displayed by both institutions.
About Ian Burn and Blue Reflex (1966)
Ian Burn was born in 1939 in Geelong, Victoria. He lived and worked in Sydney up until he died from an accidental drowning incident at Pretty Beach, NSW, in 1993. He was a conceptual artist, curator and writer who spent the first part of his career working in London and New York, where he worked with a collaborative group who produced the publication Art-Language. Returning to Australia in 1977, Burn became involved in the Art Workers Union, a political and social platform that championed artists’ rights and helped change the landscape and expectations under which artists worked in Australia. Key exhibitions include The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1968); 1968, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1995); and Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn, MCA, Sydney (1996). Burn also curated many important exhibitions in Australia looking at the relationship between art, language and politics.
The surface of Blue Reflex (1966) recalls the glossy paint job on a car, transposed from the aerodynamic curves of a speeding vehicle to the still surface of a painting in a gallery. In his use of automotive paint applied by airbrush to a plywood base, Burn has purposely created an object that betrays no sign of the hand of the artist. Unlike his previous monochrome works, Blue Reflex eliminates the textured weave of canvas and the grooved strokes of the brush. Its shiny, mirror-like finish reflects the environment around it, and those who view it. Glimpsing themselves in the patina of the high-gloss paint, the viewer momentarily becomes a part of the artwork.
In this use of reflectiveness, Burn expands upon the modernist idea that an artwork should be about the conditions of its own production. Kazimir Malevich manifested this idea when he created the monochrome and non-objective painting, Black Square, in 1913. Rather than reflecting an external reality, Malevich’s painting redefined art as an object that could be concerned only with itself, with its own medium and materiality. Similarly, in Blue Reflex, Burn argues for a critical awareness about what art is, how it can be perceived and what role and function it plays in society.
About Maria Fernanda Cardoso, and Corn Cob Coil (1989), Corn Drawings (1985-89) and On the Origins of Art I-II (2016)
Maria Fernanda Cardoso was born in Bogota, Colombia in 1963, and currently lives and works Sydney. She employs unconventional and organic materials ranging from preserved starfish and emu feathers to live fleas in the creation of her sculptural works, finding inspiration in the natural world. Her work explores the natural world and its interdependence with the human world through the use of plant and animal materials in sculptures, installations and videos. She has exhibited widely through numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2003, she had her first solo show at the MCA, Zoomorphia: Maria Fernanda Cardoso, and in that same year, her work was selected to be shown at the 50th Venice Biennale, in the Colombian Pavillion.
In Corn Cob Coil (1989), Cardoso has threaded hundreds of dried corn cobs on lengths of wire as a vestige of the fertile soil from her home town, Bogota. Her sculptural cables of dried husks evoke the central importance of corn in everyday pre-Hispanic and Hispanic Colombian life and the diversity of economic and cultural uses to which it can be put. Through this choice of material, Cardoso infuses the visual languages of minimalism and conceptualism with a specific reference to her country of origin.
Corn Drawings (1985-89) are a documentation of works that have lived through a cycle of growth and decay. Using the gallery as a place of cultivation as well as display, Cardoso ‘grew’ works on paper from corn seed on paper and water,
documenting their passage from dried seed to seedling, planted into the shapes of hands and feet, or the letters of the alphabet. In the work, the artist incorporates not only these atmospheric elements of the gallery but also the element of duration: the seeds must sprout in their own time as they transform themselves from potential energy to released energy, growing from one material into another.
In On the Origins of Art I—II (2016), Cardoso explores the art forms of the animal world through the mating rituals of a tiny Australian spider, the Maratus, an eight-eyed spider commonly known as the ‘peacock spider’. Like peacocks, the male Maratus has developed a complex system of courtship display that exhibits its prowess as a dancer, musician and visual artist. Cardoso has recorded their ostentatious mating ritual using high-definition cameras and a laser vibrometer, capturing their conspicuously colourful dance and the distinctive beat they make with their vibrating abdomens. In presenting an art form of performance and display that is not created by, or for, humans, Cardoso argues that humans are not alone in their production and appreciation of the arts.
About Juan Davila, and Yawar Fiesta (1998) and Love (1988)
Juan Davila was born in Santiago, Chile in 1946, and currently lives and works in Melbourne. Over the last three decades, Davila’s paintings have interrogated cultural, sexual and social identities, resulting in a rich, complex and provocative body of work. His work has been shaped by the political upheaval during the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile in the 1970s, conveying the violence and psychological turmoil its citizens experienced. A distrust of nationalism and state control has formed a strong thread in Davila’s work ever since, extending to stinging and often hilarious critiques of the Australian political system, aspects of government policy, and public figures in Australia and Latin America.
Since the 1970s, Davila has exhibited widely throughout Australia, the Americas and Europe and was included in the 1982 Biennale of Sydney and 2007 Documenta (Kassel, Germany). His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the MCA and National Gallery of Victoria in 2006, and is represented in numerous major state, regional and public collections in Australia, as well as in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo in Spain.
The spectacle of violent energy that Juan Davila presents in Yawar Fiesta (1998) channels the struggles over political power and cultural identity that have resulted from colonisation. This massive print on vinyl was intended as a floorwork, and so to be viewed from both sides. When hung on a wall, it presents a disorienting view of a world turned upside down, where one hemisphere twists into another. Davila further deranges the work’s spatial coherence by referring in its margins to the art of indigenous cultures and the Latin American avant-garde. This layering of references to bullfighting, Aboriginal painting and Latin American art and literature in Yawar Fiesta refer to Davila’s own history as a politically-active painter and to the conflicted histories of the two nations, Chile and Australia, in which he has lived.
In Love (1988), Davila takes a well-known piece of pop art – Robert Indiana’s work LOVE from 1966 – and reworks it as a politically charged piece of social activism. The four large letters of this square canvas spell SIDA, the Hispanic acronym for AIDS. In this work, Davila adopts an earthy tonality of muted colours and scrawled and scratched lines, in which dripping biomorphic patterns suggest the representation of contamination and the disintegration of the body. While the four stacked letters of Indiana’s work spoke to the spirit of universal love, Davila’s Love was created for a generation coming to terms with the global AIDS pandemic, contesting the hetero-normative associations that the word ‘love’ embodied in Indiana’s depiction of Americana pop culture.
About Rosalie Gascoigne and Habitation (1984)
Rosalie Gascoigne was born in 1917 in Auckland, New Zealand and arrived in Canberra in 1943, where she lived and worked up until her death in 1999. Gascoigne is best known for her distinctive and poetic assemblages of mostly found materials: wood, iron, wire, feathers, and yellow and orange retro-reflective road signs, which flash and glow in the light. She brought these items from everyday life into new frames of reference, often finding beauty in overlooked things that had been discarded and left to weather.
Gascoigne came to art late in life. Holding her first exhibition in 1974 at age 57, her career spanned 25 years, during which time her work was exhibited widely both in Australia and internationally. In 1978, Gascoigne was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, and four years after that, she was chosen to represent Australia at the 1982 Venice Biennale.
In Habitation, Gascoigne infuses a minimalist aesthetic of repeated forms with an appreciation of simple things that have been marked by their passage through time. Her installation of weathered timber crates and rusting enamelware finds beauty in the patina that comes with age, and speaks of a time before today’s throwaway culture of plastic and polystyrene. Gascoigne placed great importance on the materials she worked with, selecting things that spoke of their previous lives; of where they had been and what they had done.
Each element in the work is placed within a composition that is carefully weighted toward a harmonious balance of regularity and order with individuality and difference. Arranging them in the manner of a still life, this abstract assemblage works within the modernist devices of the grid and serial repetition, using found objects of humble origin. Scavenged from rubbish dumps in the Monaro region of NSW, these utilitarian and overlooked objects are drawn directly from the local environment that was her inspiration, and bear the marks of their own history. Read either as a rural landscape of cloud-scudded horizons or an urban landscape of gridded streets and apartments, Habitation speaks to the ways in which we shape and are shaped by our environment.
About Imants Tillers and Kangaroo Blank (1988)
Imants Tillers was born in 1950 in Sydney. He currently lives and works in Cooma, NSW. Tillers is an artist, writer and curator. Since 1981 he has used his signature canvas boards to explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, from the centre/periphery debates of the 1980s, to the effects of migration, displacement and diaspora. Most recently, his paintings have been concerned with place, locality and evocations of the landscape.
Tillers has exhibited widely since the late 1960s, and has represented Australia at important international exhibitions, such as the São Paulo Biennial (1975), 1982 Documenta (Kassel, Germany) and the 42nd Venice Biennale (1986). His major commissions include the Federation Pavilion in Centennial Park, Sydney (1985–87); the Founding Donors Painting, Pure Beauty, for the MCA, Sydney (1991–97), and two key sculptures for Sydney Olympic Park (2002). His work is held in numerous major state and regional collections in Australia, and in collections in New Zealand, Japan, Spain, Finland, USA, Latvia and Mexico.
Painted on 78 canvas boards, Kangaroo Blank (1988) draws on two different visualisations of the unseen, made 200 years apart. The cloudy landscape featured in the work is based on George Stubbs’ 1772 study The Kongouro from New Holland, painted two years after Captain James Cook’s first scientific voyage to the Pacific. Stubbs was an eminent animal painter in Georgian England who painted the kangaroo without ever having seen one. His study was based on supposition and inference, drawn from written and verbal descriptions, pencil sketches and a stuffed pelt. The engraved image was reproduced and published many times, making it the standard visual representation of the kangaroo throughout the nineteenth century.
Tilllers uses Stubbs’ imagery to express an idea of Australian cultural identity as one mediated through other images and representations. Here, he erases the kangaroo that was the centrepiece of Stubbs’ image and overlays the blank boards that mark its absence with a schematic line drawing borrowed from the imagery of the conceptual artist Shusaku Arakawa, who in the 1960s/70s investigated consciousness from a quasi-scientific position and attempted to map subjective experience. In Kangaroo Blank, Arakawa’s linear projections take the place of the kangaroo; the converging lines stand in for the representation of a creature and a place, as much a subjective projection of imagination as it was of scientific objectivity and factual record.