1. 2011
   
2. 2010
3. 2009
4. 2008
5. 2007
6. 2006
7. 2005
8. 2004

2011

reconnaisance

Curated by Dr Annette Pedersen, reconnaissance features works by five Australian artists who share a strong interest in issues of social justice both in Australia and abroad.Pedersen’s concept for the exhibition originates in Bob Birch’s blog, Through Australian Eyes. Birch’s blog features photographs that document his experiences in the occupied West Bank over the past few years. His images raise a myriad of issues, and reveal the reality of what it is like to live in a situation of essential statelessness.

2010

Tom Collins, and after: a bequest and its legacy

When it purchased a dozen paintings by Sidney Nolan in 1953, The University of Western Australia was making a bold move–though for some it was a controversial one. This was its first major purchase of contemporary Australian art, and a strong signal of what was to follow. Over the next two decades some fifty-six works by twenty-five artists were acquired with support from the Tom Collins Bequest–many for the first time by any public collection in Western Australia and in the case of Nolan, in more depth than anywhere else in the country.

Out of the Darkness: Prints and Drawings from The University of Western Australia Art Collection

Following some intensive restoration the Gallery can now present this range of Australian and international prints and drawings from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, many of which focus on key Modernist movements and styles ranging from Cubism, Surrealism, Social Realism and Geometric Abstraction.

space-matter-colour. Brian Blanchflower: paintings from four decades

space-matter-colour concentrates on Brian Blanchflower’s intense, monochromatic paintings of the last decade, but also includes a broad selection, very largely from the artist’s collection, of works going back as far as 1970. The recent works are set in context, and his conjoining of colour, space and matter in deep, compelling paintings can be seen throughout. Brian Blanchflower lives near Perth and is one of Australia’s most important living artists.

Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land and Aernout Mik: touch, rise and fall

A touring exhibition by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Sydney, Maynard's exhibition featured more than 60 evocative and captivating photographic works, drawn from six bodies of work, which document the lives and culture of Maynard’s people, the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland peoples of Tasmania. Mik's exhibition was a two-channel video installation that examined the operations occurring in and around an airport security check point.

Gooch’s Utopia: collected works from the Central Desert

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery was the first venue to exhibit the Flinders University Art Museum Touring Exhibition, Gooch’s Utopia: collected works from the Central Desert, straight from its successful exhibitions at Flinders University and Riddoch Art Gallery.

2009

Conversations: 100 artists in the UWA Art Collection

Selection of works by 100 artists, spanning more than a century, which provided a broad overview of Australian art in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Transient States: Western Australian photography

Eleven photographers provided a range of creative responses to the urban landscape of Perth, a city whose physical fabric appears to be in a state of continual and often radical transition.

Imants Tillers: The long poem

While he has strongly influenced Australian art since the early 1980s, this was the first significant exhibition of his work to be held in Western Australia.

2008

Creating taste: the collection of Joe and Rose Skinner

Works that featured Australian and Western Australian artists who came to prominence in the 1950's and 1960's.

OCEAN to OUTBACK: Australian landscape painting 1850-1950

Works that featured iconic Australian landscape artists from the National Gallery of Australia.

God-favoured, Rodney Glick: Surveyed

Art works ranging across the last 15 years of renowned West Australian artist Rodney Glick's practice, in a typically idiosyncratic mix of sculpture, installation, photography and publications.

Style and Synthesis: nine Australian moderns

The notion of modernism with works by Australian artists from the early to mid-twentieth century.

Moving forward: recent acquisitions in the UWA Art Collection

A selection of works that had been acquired in the last three years by the University of Western Australia for its art collection.

Back to top

2007

Creating taste: the collection of Joe and Rose Skinner

Australian and Western Australian artists who came to prominence in the 1950's and 1960's.

The system of nature

A look, through the work of eight contemporary Australian artists, at how names and texts enter into nature.

Western Desert Mob: Kutju—One

Inaugural exhibition of the Western Desert Mob artists from the Aboriginal communities located in the remote Ngaanyatjarra Lands, Western Australia

2006

One thing after another: sets & series in Australian art

Extended series of works or prints, paintings and photographs, rarely seen in their entirety, by key Australian artists, including Sidney Nolan, Max Pam, Guy Grey-Smith, Miriam Stannage, Fred Williams and Eveline Kotai.

Picturing the Sea

Seascapes, coastal landscapes, and images of human interaction with the sea, which included two world maps from 1571 and 1723 which chart what was then known of the world and its oceans, a beautifully crafted pearl pendant, and decorated trochus shells from the Bardi Aboriginal community in the Kimberley.

Configured: Aspects of contemporary Western Australian figurative art

Contemporary representational painting curated by Perth artist Kevin Robertson, which situated current figurative practice in a distinctly postmodern context by selecting artists who re-work images from the past and explore contemporary imagery.

Transience: figurative art in new hands

The work of a small number of very recent graduates from the three university art schools in Perth, all of whom use figurative techniques. Their work can be characterised by a shared interest in small worlds, domestic and personal, and in memory, reminiscence and impermanence.

No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi

An exhibition of bark paintings and remarkable sculptures which celebrated the art and life of David Malangi Daymirringu (1927-1999) and his important role in Australia’s cultural heritage.

CRASH (and other earthly pleasures)

Drawn in part on JG Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, CRASH looked to excess, to breakdown and to collapse, even as it explored various aspects of desire.

Back to top

2005

John Peart: Paintings 1964-2004

A major travelling retrospective of this important Australian painter which covered the breadth of Peart's career, with major paintings drawn from a host of public and private collections.

flux2: new art from Western Australia

An exploration of the ways in which young artists are responding to a world in flux, in which change seems to be the only constant and existing structures are continually melting, fusing and forming new combinations.

A partial view: Australian art in the UWA Art Collection

Based around the first major book on the UWA Art Collection, launched during the exhibition, this exhibition featured 100 works from the collection, including iconic paintings by Sidney Nolan and many other Australian and Western Australian artists.

Gnarlung Wirn, Gnarlung Ngark, Gnarlung Boodja: our spirit, our mother, our country

Paintings by both Aboriginal and Balinese artists that focus on indigenous understandings of the need for careful maintenance and respect of land, as part of the Universal Relationships and Responsibilities symposium organised by the School of Indigenous Studies at UWA.

A Parched Progress: Landscapes of Australia

Australian artists picture the country in landscapes that are dominated by the structures of industrial might and European narratives of expansion. These are alien landscapes, parched by the push for economic progress, and the marginalisation of other, including indigenous, value systems.

Wolfgang Laib Passageway-Overgoing

Wolfgang Laib created fields of light, immaterial and unresolvable, with golden yellow pollen, beeswax ships that floated through the air and pools of milk and marble which glowed with an inner light in an art which is a meditation on nature and connection.

2004

Clouded Over

In this examination of clouds in contemporary Australian and historical European art, Clouded Over was an expression of the continuity and adaptation of western landscape traditions.

BIO-DIFFERENCE: the Political Ecology

Ideas concerning relationships with living systems and the interconnectivity of the different levels of life explored through an array of voices and discourses not usually explored in biological art exhibitions, focusing on two intertwining streams—an ecological perspective and living/made interfaces.

 

Approaches to Modernism

Aspects of modernist art in Perth from the 1930s to 1950s through three of the principle exponents of the movement: Portia Bennett, Elise Blumann and Iris Francis.

Threading Cultures

Indonesian textiles and Balinese art drawn from private collections in Perth, Western Australia, which highlighted the creativity and skill of Indonesian artists and the continuity of their artistic and cultural practice across the 20th century to the present.

Dreaming the Dreaming: The Kurrirr Kurrirr Cycle from Warmun

Paintings from the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. The Kurirr Kurirr is an Indigenous narrative dance cycle, originally dreamt by Rover Thomas and painted by Thomas and Paddy Tjamitji.

Pri-mates: Lisa Roet

Lisa's giant drawings of an orang-utan's hand, bronze busts of chimpanzees and photographs of the interaction between ape and human-are intimate, compelling and bizarre, pointing to the close and complex relationships between humans and apes, self and other.

Back to top