Queensland Art Gallery Annual Report 1994-95

CURATORIAL 8c SUPPORT SERVICES PROGRAM Contemporary Australian Art This area of the Collection has recently acquired many works which reflect contemporary Australia as an urban (and suburban) society. The Gallery's existing holdings of work by Howard Arkley, well known for painting such images of Australia, have been complemented by the acquisition of his Stucco home 1991, an incisive study of a white middle class icon. In stark contrast to this is the nightmarish painting Deaths in custody 1993 by Queensland artist Vincent Serico. The title of Susie Hansen's ceramic sculpture 8 die in 'Sex cinema arson' 1994 comes from a Brisbane newspaper headline and the work is a lurid monument to urban violence and the sensational way it is reported. Civilised obsession 1992-93 and Thoughts on Civilisation 1994, two works by Rodney Spooner, present in abstract form a critique of the orderly grid systems on which twentieth-century dreams of a utopian city have been based. The Gallery has also acquired a wall-sculpture, Silent infestation (3) 1994, by Judith Kentish who, like Rodney Spooner, reveals an ability in younger Queensland artists to produce work which is intellectually stringent yet intuitively expressive. The complexities of Australian culture today are suggested by such acquisitions as Maria Kozic's five-panelled Cumics 1987 (a parody of the heroic male, using images from Italian comic books), Jihad Muhammad John Armstrong's installation Triptych 1990 (which incorporates aspects of Islamic life) and Richard Bell's painting Out to dry 1993 (a satirical commentary on Aboriginal assimilation and the new class frictions it is creating among Murri people). The Gallery's fine collection of non-figurative art associated with The Field' exhibition of 1968 has been complemented with two paintings by artists who were included in that exhibition, The death of Nelson 1992 by Dick Watkins and a key early work by the late Ian Burn, his first Re-ordered painting 1965. The Gallery has also acquired works which use the landscape as an oblique metaphor for human experience. Kim Mahood's three moulded paper wall-pieces from her 1993 'Skin' series create an equivalence between the human body and a map, and Anne Lord's large dark painting Close I 1991 is a response to the brooding presence of the tropical monsoon. Attention has been given to collecting the work of indigenous Queensland artists. The Gallery has acquired eight such works in the past year, including a relatively early (c.1970) Mornington Island bark painting by Lindsay Roughsey telling the history of the Lardil people, the artist's language group, as well as an urban painting, Amalgamation 1994, by Torres Strait Islander Brian Robinson, and a sculpture, Dreamtime travellers 1994, by Rick Roser. Important additions to the collection of Aboriginal art were also made with a small, early painting ( 1988) by Queenie McKenzie, who has become the best-known woman artist of the Kimberleys in Western Australia, and an exceptionally large bark painting by the distinguished Arnhem Land artist John Mawurndjul, Mardayin and Wongkurr (sacred objects and dilly bags) 1994. Australian Art This year has been an outstanding one for the Gallery's Australian Art section with several major purchases impacting on the Collection. A vorticist– inspired painting by the Sydney Modernist artist Roland Wakelin, entitled The Bridge under construction 1928, was added to the Collection and was lent to the new Logan City Art Gallery for its opening in February 1995. A work of great vitality, it enhances the Gallery's small group of works by Sydney-based early Modernists, such as Cossington Smith, de Maistre and Crowley. Both the fin-de-siecle decorative arts and Conder holdings were added to by the acquisition of a unique silk and mahogany screen painted by Charles Conder in Paris in 1899. Showing scenes based on the Commedia dell'arte, Le retour de Pierrot (The return of Pierrot) 1899, the screen was executed with the assistance of Conder's friend, Arthur Blunt. Other notable acquisitions have been a rare Surrealist-inspired watercolour and gouache by Peter Purves Smith, Figures on a beach 1948, a richly textured 1951 abstract painting by Grace Crowley and a selection of works by Isaac Walter Jenner, among them aview of Brisbane from New Farm. The nineteenth-century collection also included a work which has been on loan to the Gallery for several years. Painted by the Portugese