Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia for the first time on 3 February 1954, when Garry Shead was just twelve years old: she was the first reigning monarch to ever visit Australia. At the time, there was a massive outpouring of nationalism and it was estimated that seventy percent of the popu
Within the tradition of Australian landscape painting there have been few painters, who through their unique vision, have expressed our relationship to the world with such exceptional originality as William Robinson.
As Lou Klepac explains:
The rise of Rick Amor to the prominent position he now enjoys in Australian art is well known and widely documented. There was perhaps an inevitability in his steady progress, for as an artist he is single minded, hardworking and unpretentious in his public persona
Rosalie Gascoigne embarked on her career as an artist at the age of 57, and experienced an unprecedented and meteoric rise to the summit of Australian art. Gascoigne first exhibited at Macquarie Galleries, Canberra in 1974, however it was her inclusion in the Artist’s Choice exhibition at Ga
In 1958 Arthur Boyd was given significant recognition with an invitation to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. In a somewhat unexpected pairing, he was to be shown alongside Sir Arthur Streeton (1867-1943), Australia’s most significant painter of the previous generation who had died fifteen yea
Lloyd Rees is known as one of the great interpreters of the Australian landscape. He has alternated between ‘light and dark moods’ throughout his artistic career; with earlier European-inspired works favouring lead as a medium, to his later works where titanium white was used freely, ‘culmin
Sidney Nolan’s universally acclaimed achievement is the first Ned Kelly series of paintings produced while the artist lived at Heide, the home of John and Sunday Reed, and first exhibited in Melbourne in 1948. 27 of these celebrated paintings were donated by Sunday Reed to the colle
As vision grows I see more. I bring back materials from the landscape and place them around. Little things lying on ledges, or laid out on the floor or in the garden. They are then available to be looked at in my space. As things are moved about,
Sidney Nolan was a great lover of birds and of all things avian. Birds and flight reappear time and again in his paintings and drawings. Several important bird paintings were produced in 1948, following an extended tour of Central, Far North and Western Australia. These are now universally r
Although painted at a time when Arthur Boyd had been residing in London for a decade, Butterfly Hunter (1969) harks back to his wartime years and a previous work of the same name from 1943 which he presented to the National Gallery of Australia in 1975.
The 1943 version is