Win Schubert was one of this Gallery’s greatest friends and most ardent and involved donors, gifting and supporting work that always encouraged and lifted our ambition. Win truly believed in the potential of art to touch lives, to open minds and excite the imagination. And, at its best, to bring people together in shared curiosity and wonder. I genuinely think Win understood the mystery of art, but she also knew her way around the art world.
These three works honour and continue that spirit, even if they could hardly be more different in their scale and the method of their making. Yet there are three things that bind them closely, three things that hint at the direction we hope to take as this Trust Collection grows from this beginning.
The first is that Olafur Eliasson, Fiona Hall and Tacita Dean are all mid-late career artists who have remained consistently inventive for decades. Each has represented their country at the Venice Biennale, and each is represented in some of the world’s most significant public and private collections. Their inclusion in major solo and group exhibitions is similarly deep and wide — they have built substantial and enduring reputations at home and abroad. We chose their work to form the foundation of the Trust Collection because they are singular artists of great distinction and deserved acclaim in the global art world.
Second, they are artists who all have a thorough command of scale, one of art’s least well understood attributes. It shifts register from the jewellery-like intimacy of Hall’s sardine tins; to the reach of Dean’s wall-based chalk mural; to the gallery-scaled drama of Eliasson’s installation.
Looking at Fiona Hall’s work from any distance is entirely unhelpful. It’s impossible to absorb the humour with which she has defined dual zones to counterpoint erogenous body parts and botanical species, or to read the coded languages of their titles. Using a repoussé technique to work her aluminium — engraving, chasing and burnishing in the tradition of the colonial silversmith — she has cut and hammered out two astonishing series of works. Taken together with their companion series, held in the National Gallery of Victoria and National Gallery of Australia, they confirm her place in the story of contemporary art.
Fiona Hall ‘Australian set’ 1998–99 and ‘Sri Lankan set’ 1999 (from ‘Paradisus Terrestris’ series)
Tacita Dean holds a similar place, a British artist who in 2018 had her work shown simultaneously at the London National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Her commanding, mural-scaled chalk drawings reach across time to summon up the sublime landscapes of JMW Turner, but expand even his imposing scale to cinematic proportions. For all their majestic grandeur, these monumental chalk drawings are intensely personal, diaristic palimpsests, of which this is perhaps the most personal of them all. Looking at Tacita Dean’s work will take distance and closeness when it debuts in ‘Air’ this coming summer.
Olafur Eliasson’s work, moreover, has already featured in ‘Water’, which we presented over the 2019-20 summer. Like Dean’s and Cai Guo-Qiang’s Heritage before it, it is a meditation on the impact of climate change, as it has affected the artist’s home in Iceland and as it continues to affect the world. By staging a reimagined landscape at 1:1 scale in the museum, Eliasson asks us to reconsider how we think about both nature and culture, precisely as Hall has done. This time, looking requires walking into and through the work itself.
Thirdly, the thing common to each of these works is the beautiful and surprising way in which they reveal their mystery through the most basic of materials. As Hall lifts sardine tins and drink cans to new aesthetic and iconographic heights; Dean pushes white chalk far beyond its mundane purpose; and Eliasson recasts the natural world. There is for each, expressed in their conceptual approach and revealed through the humble materiality of their work, a belief in the power of artistic alchemy.
For this announcement, we were delighted to receive video messages from Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean, and to be joined in person at the Gallery by Fiona Hall, and to hear each artist speak about the ideas and processes behind these important works of art.
This is an edited excerpt of a speech given by QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM for the announcement of the inaugural acquisitions for The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Charitable Trust Collection at the Queensland Art Gallery on Friday 27 May 2022.
When Robert MacPherson AM died, on 12 November 2021, aged 84, Australia lost one of the most important artists of his generation. What made his contribution so remarkable was the way in which he translated the arcane languages and modes of contemporary art, particularly those of conceptualism and minimalism, into images and objects that formed a reply to everyday life. MacPherson was an ‘artist’s artist’, someone whose work commands immense respect among the contemporary art community but whose contribution to broader visual culture is perhaps less well known than it deserves to be. In a career spanning 50 years, he exhibited nationally as well as in the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates and in group exhibitions in Lisbon, The Hague, Berlin, Sao Paolo and Singapore. More than that, he is extensively represented in our national and state gallery collections, including here in Queensland.
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) presented a career-spanning survey of MacPherson’s work, ‘The Painter’s Reach’, in 2015. The exhibition drew together the disparate strands of his interests, revealing an artist who spent his lifetime attending to notionally simple ideas, unfolding their endless complexity and potential for artistic enquiry. ‘The Painter’s Reach’ was about making works of art, the work of the ‘artist’ (in contrast to that of the ‘painter’) and the nature of ‘work’ itself. Often described as an auto-didact, MacPherson’s deep curiosity grew out of a fascination with rules and systems of all kinds; whether drawing on the history of art and social history, or the natural world and its taxonomies. His work was grounded in his biography: driven by a deep family connection to the land and his history as a cane field worker, a ringer, and a ship painter and docker. For MacPherson, art and life were inextricably joined.
‘The Painter’s Reach’ featured a work from the QAGOMA Collection that is unarguably one of MacPherson’s greatest achievements. Previously unseen at full scale, 1000 Frog Poems: 1000 Boss Drovers (‘Yellow Leaf Falling’) For H.S. 1996–2014 (illustrated), comprises 2400 A3 sketch-pad sheets bearing ink, pen and pencil portraits with cursive tributes to the Boss Drover in its margins. Each is drawn under the guise and hand of Robert Pene, a 10-year-old student at St Joseph’s Convent in Nambour, and dated 14 February 1947, MacPherson’s 10th birthday. They form an impossibly vast mosaic filled with the legendary men and women who drove cattle along the storied stock routes of the east coast. It is a work of brilliant archival research and artistic vision, whose epic and obsessive presence echoes and amplifies the unassuming love and precision invested in its making. Unsurprisingly, for MacPherson, it dignifies and memorialises humble but hard-working lives.
Perhaps MacPherson’s most instantly recognisable works belong to his ‘Mayfair’ series, including QAGOMA’s Mayfair: (Swamp Rats) Ninety-Seven Signs for C.P., J.P., B.W., G.W. & R.W. 1994-94 (illustrated). It taps into the hand-painted blackboard roadside signs that appear on the verges of our regional highways –the white-on-masonite words that alert us to, for example, the block ice and bait to be found 500, then 250, metres along the road. This random and poetic and wonderfully ironic exploration of the amateur sign-maker’s art elevates the ‘Mayfair’ series beyond the vernacular and enables it to cross over into the lingua franca of the contemporary art world. This use of amateur roadside signs as a locus of meaning and a source of cultural knowledge, combined with his deep affection for the universality of language, gave him an unerring ability to define an Australian idiom.
Robert MacPherson lived and made art in Brisbane for five decades. He received an honorary Doctorate from Griffith University in 1995 and the Australia Council Emeritus Award in 1997. In 2015, he was recognised as a Queensland Great and honoured for his formative role in the history of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2020. Reflecting on his career, I feel bound to say that it’s all too easy to overlook rigorous and serious artists like MacPherson, whose work requires our close attention but refuses to seduce it. Vale Robert MacPherson, who pursued his artistic project with a certainty and a sense of purpose that consciously eschewed critical and public recognition. Now that we have lost him, it’s time we looked again at what he left behind.
Chris Saines CNZM is Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
In their significance, brilliance and invention, the paintings in ‘European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’ are as revelatory today as ever. Drawn from one of the world’s greatest art museum collections, the 65 paintings featured are exhilarating in the scope of their claims on the knowledge, pleasure and meaning found in art. Their extraordinary reach confirms the power of art.
This story of 500 years of European painting, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, reveals the key shifts in artistic enquiry across a formative period in Western art history. Earlier, painting was used for miniature illustration and the decoration of illuminated manuscripts, or for wall-based murals, mosaics, tapestries, stained glass or polychromed sculptures. This three-part account — Devotion and Renaissance; Absolutism and Enlightenment; and Revolution and Art for the People — shows how the paintings in this story became increasingly accessible, both materially and in their subject matter. While ‘European Masterpieces’ is largely focused on the course of that trajectory, it also reveals how meaning is made; namely, the more we know of the conditions in which these works of art were created, the more likely our stories will find company and wisdom in theirs.
Across 500 years
Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), Italy c.1395–1455 / The Crucifixion c.1420–23 / Tempera on wood, gold ground / 63.8 x 48.3cm / Maitland F Griggs Collection, Bequest of Maitland F Griggs, 1943 / 43.98.5 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The earliest painting in this exhibition, Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion c.1420–23 (illustrated), is in telling contrast to the latest, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies 1916–19 (illustrated). Everything that separates these two works — from their scale and subject matter to their mode of production — speaks to the evolution of Western art over five centuries. Whereas Fra Angelico entreats us to witness a transcendent event in the life of Christ, Monet invites us to experience a mere moment in the life of his much-loved garden: one is other-worldly and eternal; the other drawn from this world but entirely ephemeral.
In a departure from the segmented and hierarchical images of Christ’s Passion that preceded it during the Middle Ages, the figures gathered around the base of the cross in The Crucifixion occupy a common ground plane. While this work intends to provoke spiritual reflection just as much as its precursors did, here the composition makes the story all the more palpable. The mounted soldier in a blue tunic, to the right of the cross, acts as an interlocutor in dialogue with the viewer, drawing us into the turmoil unfolding in the moment of Christ’s death. His impassive bearing stands in violent contrast to the grief-stricken Saint John, below, whose love and empathy for the collapsed Virgin implores ours.
Fra Angelico was a friar in the Dominican Order whose workshop painted altarpieces and frescoes for churches and monasteries, and his work was reliant on charity and guided by vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. In this small, skilfully devised panel of painted and gilded wood, Fra Angelico sets the exhibition’s course, begging us not to turn away from the face of suffering. Even for a nonbeliever, an apparently immutable image can encompass manifold meanings. Beyond this appeal to devotion and moral reflection, which is at the heart of a spiritual life, Fra Angelico’s call to our common humanity carries through to the present day.
Monet’s Water Lilies, which closes the exhibition, is derived from another kind of belief system — one which values empirical evidence over divine intervention. From his studio and garden at Giverny, outside Paris, Monet sought out an instant in nature’s relentless flux, taking realism to the edge of abstraction. This profoundly modern desire for instantaneity was at the heart of the Impressionist movement, itself named pejoratively for Monet’s Impression, Sunrise 1872. Unlike the fixed and timeless suspension of Fra Angelico’s vision, Monet’s worldview is more simply possessed of a light breeze that gently disturbs the mutability of the natural world, painted en plein air, as light and wind play over the water’s surface.
Monet asks us to live fully in the moment, to see the world reflected in the smallest corner of a pond. His approach might be compared to the Western practice of mindfulness, with its roots in Eastern religious traditions. In contrast with Fra Angelico’s fast-drying and unforgiving medium of tempera, Monet’s use of oils allowed him to paint with a verve and energy much closer to the dynamic experience of modern life. In late works, such as Water Lilies, he also altered the relationship between the painted image and reality by abandoning a fixed viewpoint. Taking their cues from successive innovations and influences, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints and photography, artists such as Monet were freed from the linear perspective that had defined pictorial space since the Renaissance, and were thereby enabled to construct new ways of seeing a fast-changing world.
Claude Monet, France 1840–1926 / Water Lilies 1916–19 / Oil on canvas / 130.2 x 200.7cm / Gift of Louise Reinhardt Smith 1983 / 1983.532 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Where past meets present
Looking back over the course of these five centuries of European art history, it is clear artists have always turned to the past to find a way through into the future. Cézanne looked back when striving to surpass Impressionism via ‘something solid and lasting like the art of the museums’, which he found in the work of Poussin; and Poussin looked back to a formal grammar Raphael rediscovered in the distant past of the classical world. Looking forward, with the benefit of Cézanne’s groundbreaking legacy, Georges Braque would seize on Picasso’s idea of Cubism while painting the overlapping geometric volumes and rooftop planes of houses at L’Estaque in 1908, only a short distance from the village of Gardanne. At such turning points, these moments of innovation and reply, the vital correspondences between the artist, the world and the viewer, are renewed.
Art tells our stories, sacred or profane, be they drawn from the artist’s eye or mind, from literature, poetry or life. All these patterns of creative intention are present in ‘European Masterpieces’, which richly rewards the act of looking. It is through looking that artists themselves discover the alchemy that occurs across time. This act in turn can have a profound effect on how they imagine their own place within a creative continuum. ‘European Masterpieces’ includes works made in reply to a vast array of intellectual and aesthetic energies, in an arc that opens with the Early Renaissance and closes toward the final years of Impressionism. These are paintings that, in the end, forcefully remind us that all art, at one point in time, is contemporary.
Edited extract from European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ‘Painting as a form of reply’ by Chris Saines CNZM, Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne, France 1839–1906 / Gardanne 1885–86 / Oil on canvas / 80 x 64.1cm / Gift of Dr and Mrs Franz H Hirschland, 1957 / 57.181 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin, France 1594–1665 / Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man 1655 / Oil on canvas / 125.7 x 165.1cm / Marquand Fund, 1924 / 24.45.2 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Raphael
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio or Santi), Italy 1483–1520 / The Agony in the Garden c.1504 / Oil on wood / 24.1 x 28.9cm / Funds from various donors, 1932 / 32.130.1 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This Australian-exclusive exhibition was at the Gallery of Modern Art from 12 June until 17 October 2021 and organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Art Exhibitions Australia.
Featured image detail: Nicolas Poussin Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man 1655
James Turrell’s Architectural Light series represents the artist’s smallest works in number, but the largest in terms of sheer physical size, and they adorn public and private buildings and structures around the world, including, of course, the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) Night Life 2018.
In this interview, I spoke with James Turrell from the artist’s home near Flagstaff, Arizona, about the idea of taking light out of a room and into the night.1
Chris Saines (CS) | James, I wanted to take you back to the concept statement that you provided to me in 2016 — in response to the brief for the work, which, of course, we now know as Night Life. You recalled this formative experience that you’d had as a young boy, about six. You were sitting alongside your father as he piloted his small plane in to land in Los Angeles, just as the sun set over the city. Why has that particular moment remained such a vivid and important one right up to the present day? James Turrell (JT) | Well, the big thing was that the sun had actually gone down before we were landing, and we were just watching the lights of the city come out. It’s always beautiful, and it makes us seem like we’re almost a bioluminescent lichen on the surface of the earth. And, just as we were watching the lights beginning to come out, which was very beautiful, he said: ‘a peasant by day, a princess by night’. I’ll never forget that. We do this ourselves — we dress up, change our clothes from our work clothes, or however we were during the day, and then go out at night. It’s this other time when we have this other raiment that we put on. And buildings do this and structures do this and cities do this.
CS | It’s true to say that the public immediately engaged with Night Life, so it prompts me to ask, who is the audience for the works in this series, and who do you have in mind when you conceive of them? JT | Well, this is a strange thing, because I know that Carl Andre said that his art was for everyone, but many people didn’t understand that or see any art in his work whatsoever.2 And I come from a Quaker family that does not believe in art — they think art is a vanity. The fact is, I like art where you don’t have to read about it to know how to look at it. And so I do want [to make] something that people respond to, you know, and it’s terrible to say, but it’s not that different than when I was a child in a crib, fascinated by the light above me. It’s this quality that you don’t need a program to tell the players [how to play] — you know that it’s you and how you are looking, and that it’s made for you and how you see. This idea of almost a conversation between buildings, this idea of raiment at night and a building taking on a new personality. The fact is, the work is rather astonishingly simple and I don’t want to need it to require an intellectual support system. I guess that would be the best way to say it. On the other hand, I think that if you get into anything intellectually, it can be quite deep and profound, and [my work has] a lot to do with how we think about our built environment, how we think about structures at night and how we think about the use of energy, all these things. So there is a lot to say about all these things. Of course, now that we’re involved with LED light, things are changing. Rather than putting light outside and aiming it up at a building that then spills up into the night sky and decreases our ability to see the stars at night, I do enjoy having the light within a building . . .
CS | That leads very well into my next question. When planning a new work in this series, what are the first principles that come into play as you form your initial response to a commission brief? JT | First of all, it’s a look at the building, its location and the age or time of the building, where it sits in the history of the art of architecture, and to have a way of understanding what the building is expressing — its connection with the built environment around it [is very important]. It was very helpful to get images that were taken all around GOMA, looking [at the building] every which way. Some photos seemed like they have little to do with anything I would be doing, but they helped me to know about the area and its history.
CS | So it’s about where a building is in the world, how it relates to the city around it and the history of that place. It’s all incredibly important. How precisely have you applied those first principles to developing the work here in Brisbane? JT | Sometimes you know more about how to make up your own history as you see more of it. Some of these things are unintended, but then as this history goes forward, you [end up] not just seeing yourself, but seeing yourself in relationship to all these other factors, not just people. If you’re involved in art, you’re going to be a globalist. You are thinking about people all over the world, and you think about the different places where things go and the different characters of landscape, atmosphere, and people and culture.
CS | The architects who were responsible for GOMA had a great vision in that they imagined a light or a projection work contained in a cavity behind the building’s north-east and south-east facades, the two big glass facades facing Maiwar Green and the Brisbane River. Have you ever made a work that involved using some part of a building’s glass facade as a kind of monumental light box? JT | No, I haven’t, and this is the first time that this has been possible. In a way, it wasn’t as easy as I first thought . . . because we had to go back and forth and take pictures of this and that. So it was more difficult than I had thought, but we could have made it easier if we were involved in that design; however, that was already there, and that was something that was really quite special. It was something I was actually very, very pleased to work with.
CS | So, given that GOMA is a contemporary art museum, in what ways did that influence your thinking about what this work could be for Brisbane? JT | The first thing I want to say is that there is nothing but contemporary art, because the artist was living when it was made. So the context of all art is contemporary. However, we talked about the time and the period and particularly the context of the reality that was formed at this time, and it’s wonderful to be involved with a [structure] from my time. It’s been very different with many earlier buildings . . . So this was a special project. As I said before, in a way, you would think that this would be right up my alley, but we had some difficulty, because of the narrow-ness, and also just trying to get the lighting even with the fixtures that we have available today.
CS | Is staging a work like Night Life a little bit like staging an opera? You know, the performer being the work itself and the building, and the city its stage? JT | It totally is the performer, and I’m lighting the performer.
CS | Does that mean that, in a way, you’re working like a composer who’s scoring with light, rather than with sound? Is that how you also try to express elements like time and duration that are in Night Life? JT | Yes, very much so. I mean, this is a scoring. I’m also trying to give it my sense of time, which is to slow things down, and that helps in that I can bring in more subtleties and nuances of colour, [in the hope that] they’re actually noticed. And so it is literally a scoring. A lot of that came from working with operas in Europe.3
CS | I don’t think I’ve seen a building in which you’ve admixed colour in this particular way, in our work, the colour shifts — red shifts into orange which shifts into the next colour. I don’t think I’d seen that in any of your other Architectural Light works. Is that the case? JT | That’s the case, and that is also largely due to LED light. Previously, we didn’t have the ability to work with LED light. The colour [before] was quite flat, and we didn’t have 16-bit technology or the level of computer control that we now have. So, in some ways, I’ve taken advantage of that, as well as of this modern building that had this light box quality.
CS | What is it about the quality of light that you have created in this work — its colour temperature, its volume? It seems to me that both of those things have been ‘turned up’ in Night Life. JT | That’s very true, particularly because of the large area that I was able to work with. Then, by slowing it down, introducing one colour into another, you get to notice colour temperatures and colour qualities that are often quite special and unusual.
CS | Since the work has been in the world, it’s been variously described in terms such as breathing light, beauty, generosity . . . JT | You know, you have these canvases or these situations or possibilities, these opportunities that exist, and, as any artist would, you go there, whether or not [these opportunities] can be realised. Sometimes they aren’t realised right away, but this is one that was realised in a way that actually feels very good . . .
Endnotes 1 Chris Saines spoke with James Turrell in April 2019 via Skype; the interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 2 Carl Andre (b.1935) is a sculptor and poet, and a leading exponent of Minimalism. He constructs sculptures from modular units of industrial materials, for example, planks of timber, blocks of wood, house bricks and metal plates. 3 James Turrell collaborated with French composer Pascal Dusapin on the opera To Be Sung. First staged in Paris in 1994, the opera was then performed extensively throughout Europe.
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What a strange and perilous and testing time we find ourselves in. Like art communities and institutions right across the world, QAGOMA has acclimatised to uncertainty as we grapple together with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being unanchored from our usual workplaces, schedules and habits of a lifetime is disquieting, but it has also been a moment in which responsive initiatives and new ways of reaching out to support our communities have flourished. Yes, it is a strange spell of stillness and sometimes darkness for so many here in Australia and around the globe, but the wonderful reply of art and of artists of all kinds has surely been one of our greatest sources of human connection, comfort and hope.
QAGOMA’s initial priority, as the scale of the challenge became apparent, was to ensure our immediate community, the Gallery’s staff, its volunteers and its visitors, were safe and well. In the weirdly quiet weeks preceding our closure it was the task we were most focused on. When our doors closed to the public, at midday on 23 March, we were already working behind the scenes to facilitate working from home for as many staff as possible, and ensuring the strictest on site safety measures for those still within our two buildings performing essential tasks, including the deinstallation of ‘Water’ and the preparations required for what comes next. Despite the odds, it has been a hugely productive period.
With most staff now working from home, we are focusing on how to re-establish our calendar of exhibitions so they will eventually occur as intended, though many will be rescheduled or rethought in some way. While we have withdrawn ‘Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles’ from the current schedule – it was due to open in June – we are committed to presenting the Mori Art Museum exhibition if its international tour can be reconstructed. I’m hopeful, because Shiota’s interests and ideas seem even more germane to a post-pandemic world. Major exhibitions by Gordon Bennett and William Yang will move too, among others, but we intend to re-open with the stunning survey of late North Queensland artist Mavis Ngallametta that opened only days before our closure.
‘Mavis Ngallametta: Show Me the Way to Go Home’ installed at Queensland Art Gallery, 2020
Looking at opportunities as much as challenges, we are crystallising and fast-tracking projects across our digital platforms. While work had already begun on an institution-wide Digital Transformation project it will soon accelerate, not least in the Collection online space, well beyond where we imagined we would be today. In coming weeks and months, we will roll out a wealth of new and re-purposed digital content that focuses on our large archive of talks and interviews with artists, celebrates a new work each week, encourages kids to get hands-on, and explores the ‘Water’, ‘Mavis Ngallametta’ and ‘I, Object’ exhibitions. We’ve even developed a new Learn at Home module for students from Prep to Year 12, which will be a resources windfall for remote learners, teachers and parents alike.
The QAGOMA website homepage refreshed with #homewithQAGOMA highlights
In all of this, we are relentlessly focusing on our core mission, even when it’s not capable of being activated through the direct, social experience of art. Our commitment to bridging the connection between art, artists and audiences is not remotely undimmed – indeed it’s never been more vital. By sharing the ideas and meanings of art, in all its forms, we are continuing to serve our community. Art of course does more than inspire and engage us in gallery settings, it draws people together in ways that can have a deep effect on their sense of wellbeing and cultural and social connectedness. While knowing that many thousands of people around the world are confronted with almost inconceivable anxiety, fear and trauma, the truly transformative power of art is standing upright and in plain sight.
This is a singular time in all living memory: when almost every community in the world is being touched to some degree, greater or lesser, by one momentous all-consuming event. The media coverage alone isn’t just saturating, it’s also narrowing of everything else still occurring in the world. This is the very time we should embrace the unbroken capacity of the arts, and not least the visual arts, to lift our gaze, evoke empathy and to make visible the power of what a community can achieve when it comes together – through the song that rang out from the balconies of Italy, to grateful applause from the doorways and windows of England on Thursday nights. This is humanity acknowledging what it is to be human when we need each other most.
Those of us privileged to work at QAGOMA, or at any public art institution, must never forget how fortunate we are to be able to move among living artists and to live surrounded by the enduring and often profound stories of art. While that dimension of our working lives has changed profoundly in recent months, our role still is to hold, care for and communicate those stories in the best way we potentially can. While that might mean sharing them solely online, for the time being, we know that in doing so we are supporting artists and our audiences who are, in the end, the ones who give meaning to all our work.
On behalf of the entire QAGOMA team and our Board, I hope you’ll stay safe and go well into everything that lies ahead of us, while supporting each other and remaining optimistic. We look forward to welcoming you back to the Gallery when the time is right. For now, we hope you’ll spend a little time at home with QAGOMA.
Stay inspired through our many social and digital channels or simply visit the QAGOMA website for the latest #homewithQAGOMA highlights
As the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) celebrates 125 years since its establishment on 29 March 2020, we look at the role of the Foundation in sustaining a philanthropic community at QAGOMA that has been integral to the story of the Gallery’s Collection and the success of its exhibitions and other achievements. Here, we touch on some of the milestones of the past four decades as the Gallery recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its Foundation.
Since the inception of the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation in 1979, this institution’s fundraising body has been inextricably linked to the story of its Collection. From humble beginnings, albeit with some exquisite high profile international acquisitions, it has grown to encompass an enthusiastic community of givers whose great generosity has allowed the Gallery to build a Collection with both a broad base and exceptional areas of focus.
Thai artist Montien Boonma (left) installing Lotus sound in the Queensland Art Gallery for ‘The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT1), September 1993 / Image courtesy: QAGOMA Research Library / Photograph: Christabelle Baranay
The Foundation is a Committee of the Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees that works to build and sustain our philanthropic community. It accepts gifts and raises money, primarily for acquisitions but increasingly for exhibitions, conservation, publications and wider programming. In looking back at four decades of collecting enabled by the Foundation, we can identify a number of pivotal acquisitions that help tell this larger story of our Collection, and indeed of that generous community that has nourished its extraordinary growth.
The formation of the Foundation coincided with the construction of the Robin Gibson-designed Cultural Centre, of which the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) was very much the centrepiece and a long-awaited permanent home for a somewhat itinerant Collection. Even prior to its opening in 1982, the building captured the imagination of donors. In its first six months the Foundation raised $400 000 through the first Foundation Appeal, which urged support ‘for the purchase of works of art to enrich the Gallery’s Collection and thus make it representative and commensurate with the standards expected of a major public gallery’. By June 1981 this total had reached $2.7 million, including government subsidy.
The very first acquisition through the Foundation was The Master of Frankfurt’s Virgin and Child with Saint James the Pilgrim, Saint Catherine and the Donor with Saint Peter c.1496. Other key purchases in the first two years included Tintoretto’s dramatic Cristo risorgente c.1555 and Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Marchese Filippo Spinola c.1622–27, one of the Flemish master’s most notable Genoese portraits, and Rubens’s Young woman in a fur wrap (after Titian) c.1629–30. These found a home in the new building alongside other treasures from the Collection, by then comprising 3848 works amassed during its first 90 years.
The Master of Frankfurt, The Netherlands 1460 d.c.1520-c.33 / Virgin and Child with Saint James the Pilgrim, Saint Catherine and the Donor with Saint Peter c.1496 / Oil on oak panel / 69 x 55.2cm / Purchased 1980 with funds from Utah Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Tintoretto, Venice 1518-94 / Cristo risorgente (The risen Christ) c.1555 / Oil on canvas / 201 x 139cm / Purchased 1981. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Anthony van Dyck, Flanders/England 1599-1641 / Portrait of Marchese Filippo Spinola c.1622-27 / Oil on canvas / 218.3 x 139.6cm / Purchased 1981. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Dedicated 1998 to Sir George Fisher CMG inaugural President of the Foundation (1979-85) in recognition of his distinguished service / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Peter Paul Rubens, Flanders 1577-1640 / Young woman in a fur wrap (after Titian) c.1629-30 / Oil on canvas / 91.8 x 68.3cm / Purchased 1980. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
From this selection of Old Masters, the Gallery began to widen its perspective with the emergence of a new vision that looked to Asia. Plans were laid for an ambitious and innovative series of exhibitions that would transform the Gallery’s collecting focus; The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) saw a shift from a Eurocentric collecting model to what was happening on Queensland’s doorstep. While this new approach did not exclude international acquisitions — and indeed, some of the most remarkable major works of art acquired since then have been from global artists — it gave QAG an undeniable point of difference that forms the cornerstone of our institutional vision to this day.
Throughout the 1990s, which witnessed the first three APTs and the planning stages for the new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), the Foundation continued to grow and to recognise significant donations and bequests. The annual Foundation Appeal strategically enhances the Gallery’s Collection by acquiring a single major work or set of works each year. The Appeal identifies works that resonate with a wide audience, including those by iconic international artists such as James Turrell and Yayoi Kusama, and Australian artists Ian Fairweather, Ben Quilty and Michael Zavros. Past Appeals have also enriched our understanding of the work of Indigenous Australia, as seen in the stunning collection of banumbirr (Morning Star poles) from Arnhem Land.
Over the past four decades, the Gallery has enjoyed remarkable success with its collection building, exhibitions and other achievements. Through the generosity of Foundation members and donors, and with the support of the Queensland Government, the Foundation has raised more than $140 million since its establishment, enabling the acquisition of more than 8300 artworks — over 45 per cent of the Gallery’s Collection. For this incredible commitment to building the Collection of a state institution, I sincerely thank every member of the Foundation and Committee. We have accomplished so much together, and I am very excited about some upcoming plans which will take giving, and its outcomes, to a new level at QAGOMA.
Chris Saines CNZM is Director, QAGOMA. Edited extract from the Gallery’s Artlines magazine, ‘A Forty-year Foundation’, issue 2, 2019
Feature image detail: The Master of Frankfurt Virgin and Child with Saint James the Pilgrim, Saint Catherine and the Donor with Saint Peter c.1496
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