Since the foundation in 1990, the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery has presented an innovated program of exhibitions, featuring artwork from the University extensive Art Collection, loaned works as well as new contemporary commissioned works.
The Gallery aims to continually expand its digital archive of past exhibitions.
2012
- LOOK. LOOK AGAIN
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LOOK. LOOK AGAIN is a unique survey exhibition of historic and contemporary works of art made by women in Australia. Featuring 140 artworks from 80 artists drawn from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, this exhibition provides an alternative frame of reference for engaging with Australian history and culture.
- HERE&NOW12
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HERE&NOW12 is the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery’s inaugural annual exhibition of early-career, contemporary Western Australian artists. It surveys the activities of artist-run initiatives (ARIs) and places craft-based practices and DIY endeavours within the scope of the Gallery, presenting an experimental and interconnected system of art making unique to this time and this place – Western Australia, 2012.
- Perth '62: Empire and Universe
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Featuring a diverse collection of paintings, photographs, ceramics, models and ephemera, Perth ’62: Empire and Universe analyses the year through the gaze of local artists, architects and social historians.These range from the Modernist built statements of Council House, the Perry Lakes Stadium and the athlete’s’ village at Floreat, to the paintings by such luminaries as Guy Grey-Smith, Sam Fullbrook, Tom Gibbons and Elizabeth Durack; the photographs of social gatherings by Richard Woldendorp, and ceramics by Heather McSwain and Flora Landells.
- Beyond Likeness: Contemporary Portraits
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This exhibition examined the process of revelatory portraiture through the work of local, national and international artists. These artists all strive to know more about their sitters and to represent that knowledge to an audience by employing the technologies available to them, whether paint, photography or film. As well as showcasing the works of renowned artists, Beyond Likeness also featured some high-profile sitters, including Brad Pitt and Perth's own Heath Ledger.
- Julie Dowling: Family and Friends
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Julie Dowling's early interest in portraiture was triggered by her family's quest to reclaim their history and reconnect with those family members who had been separated or lost to each other as members of the Stolen Generation. Drawing on artworks from 1995 to 2008, Julie Dowling: Family and Friends was an exhibition that charted the vast breadth of issues that drive Dowling's practice - racism, broken families, personal histories and the environment.
- Purnu, Tjanpi, Canvas. Art of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands
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Purnu, Tjanpi, Canvas. Art of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands demonstrated the dynamic creativity of the Western Desert's Ngaanyatjarra artists. The exhibition featured recent Yarnangu acrylic painting in context with the enduring tradition of purnu (wood carving) and tjanpi (grass weaving), providing a new lens through which to better understand the inventiveness and artistry of these desert people.
2011
- Recent Past: Australian Painting of the 70s and 80s
- Curated by John Barrett-Lenard, Recent Past was a survey of the work of 36 artists from the University of Western Australia's collection of big, bold and engaging painting. Exploring important ideas from a critical era of Australia's history, Recent Past sampled abstract, figurative and neo-expressionist forms, and included Sydney Ball, Lidija Dombrovska Laren, Sydney Nolan and Carol Rudyard.
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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