2007-08 Report

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COLLECTION QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY ANNUAL REPORT 2007–08 15
AUSTRALIAN ART
In the last year a number of fine acquisitions that
consolidate major directions in the Collection have been
made for the three principal portfolios that comprise
Australian art.
The earliest is an oil painting by Eugene von Guérard
entitled A view from Daylesford towards the Pyrenees
c.1864. Austrian-born von Guérard (1811–1901) came to
Australia in 1852 and stayed for almost 30 years. He was
possibly the first classically trained painter to work in
Victoria and is arguably Australia's most significant artist
of the colonial period. His work is an essential component
of any substantial collection of Australian art, but until
this acquisition von Guérard had been represented in
the Collection only by a group of lithographs. In this
picturesque golden-toned panorama, von Guérard
suggests the opportunities open to energetic settlers,
and the life of wealth and ease that would reward their
efforts. In this sense, the painting is a fine example of
the adaptation of European landscape painting to the
new continent.
The campaign to build the finest holdings of the works of
Ian Fairweather continued with the acquisition of (Snake
charmer) c.1949, an enchanting gouache, ink and
watercolour on paper from a period previously
unrepresented in the Collection. It was painted between
1948 and 1951 when the artist was living in Townsville
and Cairns, but recalls his time in India several years
earlier. (Snake charmer)featured in Fairweather's first
retrospective exhibition, organised by the Queensland Art
Gallery in 1965, and was also included in the National
Gallery of Australia's 1997 exhibition 'The Drawings of
Ian Fairweather'.
Two splendid acquisitions suggest the richness and
breadth of contemporary Indigenous art practice.
Genevieve Grieves's Picturing the old people 2006–07,
a five-channel colour video installation, was the winner of
the Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award 2007.
Based on intensive research at Melbourne's Koori
Heritage Archive and the State Library of Victoria's
nineteenth-century photographic collection, the work
creatively restages stereotypical representations of
Kooris, the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia.
The second work is by leading contemporary fibre artist
Yvonne Koolmatrie, a leader in the movement by
Indigenous artists to create sculptural fibre works.
Her Yabbie trap2008 is coil-woven, strand by strand,
from local river grasses, the basic materials used by
Ngarrindjeri women for many generations. In addition
to its elegant presence, Yabbie trap has been made
according to traditional design principles.
Signature paintings by leading mid-career artists that
build on earlier works in the Collection have enriched
holdings of contemporary Australian art. Stephen Bush
is one of Australia's leading contemporary painters.
I am a mountain I can see clearly 2008, one of a recent
body of major works which depends on a broad repertoire
of realist imagery combined with a pour painting, offers
a new and personal account of the uncanny in
Australian art.
Tony Clark's Putto David2008 engages with European
themes and is from a body of recent works influenced
by Michelangelo's sculpted figures in Florence's Medici
Chapel. Clark based Putto Davidon a sketch which
Raphael made of Michelangelo's rendering of David in
marble. The major work of Michelangelo becomes a minor
work by Raphael, and in turn a major work of Clark's;
he designates it as a putto, a 'little man', recalling the
eighteenth-century taste for giving sophisticated and
substantial works artfully dismissive titles.
Three striking paintings by Jan Nelson have also been
acquired, entitled Walking in tall grass, Rose; Walking in
tall grass, Martin; and Walking in tall grass, Matt2007.
Nelson's stunning technical virtuosity makes an original
contribution to contemporary Australian art. She
characteristically shows the gap between the world that
we experience physically and the psychological states
through which it is apprehended. The Walking in tall grass
works are intimately detailed accounts of young people
absorbed in thought or intensely focused activities,
captured against brightly coloured grounds, removed
from specific social locations. Super-realist in style, with
precise attention to detail and finish, they open up the
juncture between painting and photography as part of a
broader examination of the cult of the individual and the
sensation of anonymity in today's media-saturated world.
COLLECTION One of the Queensland Art Gallery's key goals is to develop,
manage and conserve the Collection to the highest art museum
standards for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future
users. As a two-site institution, the Gallery is able to present an
increased number of works and thematic displays from the
Collection. The Collection consists of 13 164 works, with 545 works
acquired in 2007–08.
Yvonne Koolmatrie
Australia b.1944
Ngarrindjeri people
Yabbie trap2008
Coil-woven sedge grass, river rushes
50 x 40 x 76cm (irreg.)
Purchased 2008. The Queensland
Government's Gallery of Modern Art
Acquisitions Fund