what’s on show
RE-THINKING AUSTRALIAN ART
From September, visitors will experience the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Australian art collection like never before. Gallery 6, which has only been in partial use in recent years, will be fully re-opened to reveal a new presentation of Australian art from mid last century onwards. The new thematic-based displays will challenge preconceptions of art in Australia as being isolated or singular. To borrow the words of art historian Ian McLean, the re-presentation of the collection will ‘examine the place of Australia in the world and the world in Australia’.
Encompassing diverse media - including painting, photography, decorative arts, sculpture and prints - the displays will examine the complexities of Australian art’s basic questioning of identity. Ideas relating to what it means to be Australian will be explored through a series of themes that overlap and interlock. Each thematic focus will follow the radical changes that occurred in Australian art after the Second World War including the revelation of Aboriginal art, the Feminist art movement and the rise of conceptual art and postmodernism.
South Australia’s contribution to international shifts in both art and identity will be explored. Works of art as statements of political protest and collective unrest, as well as works that speak to the experience of the individual body
