An Incomplete World: Works from The UBS Art Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
As part of the new partnership between the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and UBS, an exhibition of significant works from The UBS Art Collection is coming to Australia.
Selected by Wayne Tunnicliffe, senior curator contemporary art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Jason Smith, curator contemporary art, National Gallery of Victoria, the exhibition An incomplete world will open at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before travelling to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
An incomplete world will highlight artworks that consider how we have shaped the world and our vision of it, and how the world we have created shapes us. The exhibition has three linked thematic groups: natural and built environments; portraits and people; and transforming places. Over 50 works have been selected by 31 artists to represent these themes.
Wayne Tunnicliffe says, “This exhibition brings together great works of art from the last thirty years, the majority of which have not been seen in Australia before. UBS’s three year commitment to supporting the Gallery’s contemporary collection programs and this exhibition are together the most important sponsorship of contemporary art that the gallery has received.”
Highlights of the exhibition include:
American pop artist Andy Warhol’s unique early work Cagney,1963, depicts the film actor famous for his gangster roles. This dates from when Warhol first began to make silkscreen paintings and to concentrate on movie stars and film-making. Another Warhol in the exhibition is his iconic portrait of German artist Joseph Beuys from 1984.
Damien Hirst, one of the highest profile contemporary British artists, is represented with a large painting of coloured dots on a white ground. Entitled Albumin, Human, Glycated, 1992, it is from his series of randomly arranged spot paintings with titles that refer to pharmaceuticals. Hirst has described this series as happy paintings, and yet that joy has a chemical reference.
A substantial group of influential recent European photography includes such luminaries as Thomas Ruff with enigmatic large-scale colour portraits, Andreas Gursky with his spectacular digitally altered store interior 99 cent, 1999, and sublime image of a glacier, Aletschgelscher, 1993, and a series of Candida Hofer’s enigmatic, empty, public rooms.
The exhibition opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, on 19 May and is on display until 29 July 2007 and then tours to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, from 28 September 2007 to 6 January 2008.
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