Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

Kenneth Macqueen , Under the casuarinas, Maroochydore (detail) c.1938 Daphne Mayo working with John Theodore Muller on the central figure of the Brisbane City Hall tympanum 1930, and Brisbane City Hall with triangular tympanum visible lower left, at base of clocktower ‘Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s’ foregrounds significant works by leading Queensland artists and by major Australian artists working here in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Together, their artworks present a light-filled vision of the state and, in some instances, the flipside of that picture. Drawn entirely from the Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), the exhibition elucidates the beginnings of more experimental means of expression among Queensland artists, while revealing something of the Gallery’s collecting history and reflecting the conservative tastes of the times. ‘Under a Modern Sun’ spans the period from 1930 — with the opening of Brisbane’s City Hall, graced with Daphne Mayo’s iconic sandstone tympanum in the final stages of its completion — to the late 1950s, coinciding with the publication of painter Vida Lahey’s Art in Queensland 1859–1959 (1959), commissioned by the Queensland National Art Gallery (now QAGOMA) for the state’s centenary. Modernism comes to Queensland Samantha Littley