Home at last

13 September 2008 – 8 March 2009 | Children’s Gallery | Events

Visit an exhibition that is just like home. Home at last features prints, drawings, photographs, paintings and decorative arts by Australian artists from the national collection.

The exhibition links art making and the home and demonstrates that works of art are often inspired by the artist’s home environment.  nga.gov.au/HomeAtLast

Picture my world is a collaborative project between the Gallery and early childhood educational centres in the Canberra region in response to the themes of home and sense of place in Home at last   nga.gov.au/PictureMyWorld

Howard Arkley Floral exterior   1996   synthetic polymer paint on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra   © The Estate of Howard Arkley

Gods, ghosts and men
Pacific arts from the National Gallery of Australia

10 October 2008 – 11 January 2009

This is the first major exhibition of Pacific art to be held in Australia for nearly twenty years. It embraces the diverse Melanesian and Polynesian sculptural traditions of Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Easter Island, New Zealand and the Marquesas Islands.

Many of the works are by unnamed artists and have never before been seen by the Australian public. The works are often iconic and exquisite and include dance costumes, spirit figures and other sculptures in stone and wood as well as fibre arts, dating from as early as 3500 BCE to the present day.

nga.gov.au/GodsGhostsMen

Events

Proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund

Te Fenua Enata People  War club [u'u] wood, fibre   National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

FUTURE EXHIBITION
Degas
master of French art

12 December 2008 – 22 March 2009

Tickets now available for purchase online

For the first time audiences in Australia have the opportunity to see an exhibition devoted to one of the most significant and admired French artists of the nineteenth century, Edgar Degas.

The National Gallery of Australia presents important paintings and sculptures by Degas, as well as drawings, experimental monotypes and photographs. The exhibition draws works from major Degas collections, including Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Musée des Beaux Arts, Pau, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The exhibition highlights the artist’s favourite themes of modern life in Paris, such as portraits, horseracing, the ballet, laundresses and bathers, and demonstrates his skill as a master painter, sculptor and draughtsman.

nga.gov.au/Degas

Edgar Degas Dancers, pink and green c 1890 (detail)  oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  HO Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs HO Havemeyer, 1929 Image  © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  

FUTURE EXHIBITION
Degas’ world
the rage for change

24 January – 3 May 2009 | Orde Poynton Gallery

Degas’ world, an exhibition of European prints from the National Gallery of Australia’s collection, opens in association with the major exhibition Degas: master of French art.

It includes prints by Degas’ contemporaries: Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassat, Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Henri Fantin-Latour, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and many others. These artists, including Degas, altered the direction of art at the end of the nineteenth century, moving away from the tradition of the Paris Salon towards art that was revolutionary, independent and modern.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec  La Clownesse assise: Mademoiselle Cha-u-ka-o   [The seated clown: Mademoiseille Cha-u-ka-o]  1896  colour lithograph   National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

FUTURE EXHIBITION
Silently stirring

21 March – 8 June 2009 | Children’s Gallery

Many artists are attracted to ideas of movement, change and transformation, and animals and beings (real and mystical) are favourite subjects when depicting these ideas in works of art.

Silently stirring explores these themes through prints, drawings, photography and sculpture from the national collection.

Lionel Lindsay  Siesta  1924  wood-engraving
Bequest of Alan Queale, 1982 Courtesy of the National Library of Australia

FUTURE EXHIBITION
Misty moderns
Australian Tonalists 1910–1950

20 February – 26 April 2009 | Project Gallery

Misty moderns travels to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, from the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

It is the first major exhibition to tell the story of Australian Tonalism, a movement championed by the influential and often controversial painter Max Meldrum in the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibition is brought together from collections around Australia and includes approximately 80 works of art by Meldrum and his followers. The exhibition features works by Meldrum's best known pupils, Clarice Beckett, Percy Leason and Colin Colahan, as well as formative works by Australian Modernists Roy de Maistre, Roland Wakelin, Lloyd Rees, Arnold Shore and William Frater.

Clarice Beckett  Hawthorn tea gardens   c 1933 
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide  Gift of Sir Edward Hayward, 1980

FUTURE EXHIBITION
Soft sculpture

24 April – 19 July 2009 | Exhibitions Galleries

Soft sculpture looks at the ways artists use unconventional materials to challenge the nature of sculpture.

Visitors will see works made from cloth, rope, paper, hair, leather, rubber or vinyl. The objects may droop, ooze or splash. They are fluffy, squishy or bent. They surround, suffocate and astonish and, in many cases, make us laugh.

The exhibition features treasures from the national collection, complemented by some loans. It includes sculptures and installations by Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys and Annette Messager, and works by Australian artists such as Mikala Dwyer, David Jensz and Ricky Swallow.

Eva Hess Contingent  1969  cheesecloth, latex, fibreglass
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra