National Gallery of Victoria Announces 2021 Exhibitions
Including an exhibition of over 250 works of Australian impressionism, Melbourne Design Week 2021 which explores the idea to "Design the World You Want" and exceptional international exhibitions from French masters to Goya
This morning the National Gallery of Victoria announced the 2021 Season of exhibitions and programs including 2021 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces major blockbuster exhibition French Impressionism from The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
French Impressionism is an internationally exclusive presentation of more than 100 Impressionist masterworks in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an institution renowned world-wide for its rich holdings of Impressionist paintings. Opening 4 June at NGV International, French Impressionism will feature works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt and more – including 79 works that have never-before-been exhibited in Australia.
Also announced today, opening at NGV Australia on 2 April She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism is a large-scale exhibition of 270 artworks drawn from major public and private collections around Australia including the NGV Collection. Featuring some of the most widely recognisable and celebrated works by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E Phillips Fox, as well as bringing to light works by Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory. The exhibition will present these works in new and surprising contexts by exploring the impact of personal relationships, international influences and the importance of place on the trajectory of the movement.
Opening 11 June at NGV Australia, Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories is a major retrospective exhibition of senior Melbourne based artist and designer, Maree Clarke, who is a Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung woman, presenting more than three decades of her work, traversing photography, printmaking, sculpture, jewellery, video and glass and exploring the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices
At NGV International from 18 June, Camille Henrot: Is Today Tomorrow celebrates French born, Berlin-based contemporary artist Camille Henrot in an Australian first survey showcasing the past decade of her work. Henrot works across diverse media including sculpture, drawing, video and installation and references self-help, online second-hand marketplaces, cultural anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, and social media to question what it means to be at once a private individual and a global subject.
Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum is a world-exclusive exhibition featuring more than 160 works on paper by Francisco Goya (1746–1828), celebrating the artist’s extraordinary draughtsmanship and his unique insight into the complexities of human nature. Opening at NGV International on 25 June, this will be the first major presentation of Goya’s work at the NGV in more than twenty years, featuring 44 drawings on loan from the Prado Museum – the largest group of Goya’s drawings ever seen in Australia.
Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey will unite two important Australian artists for the first time, bringing attention to the shared materiality at the heart of the practices of both Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) and Lorraine Connelly-Northey (b. 1967). Both artist’s transformative use of found and discarded objects to create surprising and beautiful works of art will be presented at NGV Australia from 8 October.
Bark Ladies is an exhibition presented at NGV International from 19 November celebrating the NGV’s extraordinary collection of works by Yolngu women artists from the Buku Larrngay Mulka Centre (Buku) in Northeast Arnhem Land, spanning more than two decades of NGV acquisitions of works on bark by master artists.
Highlights from the 2021 Programme include:
BIG WEATHER
12 MARCH 2021 - 6 FEB 2022
Big Weather is a NGV exclusive exhibition exploring the sophisticated appreciation of weather systems that exist within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge. The exhibition highlights the role of Indigenous artists and designers in sharing stories and ceremonies connected to weather, ensuring they live on in future generations.
Big Weather will present works by over 50 important artists from the NGV Collection across media, encompassing painting, photography, weaving and sculpture. The exhibition will showcase works by artists from diverse Indigenous communities with many presenting unique interpretations of Ancestral spirit beings who bring the rain, hail, and seasonal storms that feed into our rivers to revive the landscape and nourish our wildlife.
An exhibition highlight will be the recently acquired work by Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens who responds to the destructive bushfire event in the summer of 2019/20 by drawing on humour to emphasise the devastation in a work titled We are on fire (not in a sexy way) and Stolen Climate by Clinton Naina which links the effects of Climate Change to the ongoing impacts of colonisation.
MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK 2021: DESIGN THE WORLD YOU WANT
26 MARCH - 5 APRIL 2021
Melbourne Design Week is the Australia's largest annual international design event. In 2021, Melbourne Design Week is curated around the central provocation: Design the world you want. Over 300 exhibitions, tours, talks, films and workshops will be held around Melbourne, and for the first time Gippsland in Eastern Victoria, that consider the critical role of design in imagining and creating alternative worlds with inventions, products, services, environments, materials and processes that respond to current issues and improve the quality of life for everyone.
Melbourne Design Week offers a unique opportunity to see and collect new work from established and emerging designers, hear from industry leaders and take part in tours and workshops that reveal and celebrate the impact of design in shaping our world.
SHE-OAK AND SUNLIGHT: AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONISM
2 APRIL - 22 AUGUST 2021
She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism is a large-scale exhibition of 270 works of art drawn from major public and private collections around Australia, including the NGV Collection. Featuring some of the most widely recognisable and celebrated works by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E. Phillips Fox, as well as bringing to light works by Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory, the exhibition will present these works in new and surprising contexts by exploring the impact of personal relationships, international influences and the importance of place on the trajectory of the movement.
Highlights from the exhibition include Tom Roberts’s iconic Shearing the Rams, 1890, which depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed, and Clara Southern’s An old bee farm, Warrandyte c.1900, a nostalgic vision of the landscape, painted in a soft palette of twilight tones. Following a complex conservation treatment, visitors will also be able to appreciate the newly vivid colours of the Hawkesbury River as depicted in Arthur Streeton’s ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’, 1896, which will also be on display.
She-Oak and Sunlight will chart the creative exchanges between leading figures of the movements in Australia by presenting artworks in thought-provoking groups and pairings. In particular, the exhibition will reveal the broader global context, personal relationships and artistic synergies between Australian Impressionists and those working internationally by juxtaposing Australian artworks alongside those by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and others drawn from the NGV Collection. She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism is guest curated by Dr Anne Gray AM with the NGV Australian Art Department.
MELBOURNE WINTER MASTERPIECES 2021: FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
4 JUNE - 3 OCTOBER 2021
In an international exclusive, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) will present a major exhibition of more than 100 masterworks of French Impressionism in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), an institution renowned world-wide for its rich holdings of Impressionist paintings. Opening in June 2021 as part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition series, French Impressionism will feature works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt and more – including 79 that have never-before-been exhibited in Australia.
These important loans from the MFA’s iconic collection provide the rare opportunity to see a significant grouping of Impressionist masterworks in Australia. French Impressionism will chart the trajectory of the late-nineteenth century artistic movement, highlighting the key milestones and figures at the centre of this period of experimentation and revolution in modern art. Through an arresting display of paintings and works on paper that showcases the breadth of the movement, the exhibition will evoke the artistic energy and intellectual dynamism of the period by placing emphasis on the thoughts and observations of the artists themselves, revealing the social connections, artistic influences and personal relationships that united the group of radical practitioners at the centre of this new art movement.
Presented thematically across ten sections, the exhibition will open with early works by Monet and his forebears, Eugène Boudin and painters of the Barbizon School, illustrating their profound influence on Monet’s use of the then radical method of painting outdoors en plein air (‘in the open air’) to capture changing conditions in nature. An exhibition highlight will be a breathtaking display of sixteen canvases by Claude Monet, arranged in an immersive display reminiscent of the distinctive, oval gallery Monet helped design for his famous Water Lillies at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, between 1922 and his death in 1926. Painted over a thirty-year period, these paintings depict many of Monet’s most beloved scenes of nature in Argenteuil, the Normandy coast, the Mediterranean coast and his extraordinary garden in Giverny. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of the artist’s immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement.
