Visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) will have a very different experience when they visit the Museum’s collection gallery reopening with Artists in Focus on 16 June 2023. For the first time, artists’ works will be shown in single dedicated galleries, devised by the MCA Australia curatorial team.
Artists in Focus, on show from 2023 to 2025, is a new series of collection displays that highlight bodies of work by significant artists in the MCA Australia’s permanent collection. The changing display will give visibility to artworks rarely seen, collection favorites and recent acquisitions exhibited for the first time.
The first iteration of MCA Collection: Artists in Focus in 2023 presents works by Joan Brassil, Kevin Gilbert, Simryn Gill, Jumaadi, Tracey Moffatt, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, John Nixon, Leyla Stevens and Alick Tipoti. In addition, it includes a selection of over 60 bark paintings from the Arnott’s Biscuits Collection, considered one of the most significant bark painting collections in Australia, gifted to the Museum in 1993. This room showcases the work of Aboriginal artists from the communities of Groote Eylandt, Yirrkala, Galiwin’ku, Milingimbi, Maningrida, Ramingining, Gunbalanya, Wadeye and the Tiwi Islands.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia is Australia’s only public museum solely dedicated to collecting contemporary art. Since its inception in 1989, the Museum has acquired over 4500 works across all media that offer a distinctive history of the art of our time.
Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Suzanne Cotter, said, “With its focus on the work of living artists in and from Australia, the MCA Collection has been developed over the past thirty years to become one of the most significant collections of contemporary art in the country. Artists in Focus inaugurates a program for the Collection and its display that is vitally active and that offers our many publics greater opportunity to experience some of the MCA’s exceptional art works. It is our hope that these new displays will generate inspired conversations, for artists as well as for the broader public.”
MCA Collection: Artists in Focus is curated by MCA Australia curatorial team: Pedro de Almeida, Anna Davis, Jane Devery, Anneke Jaspers, Keith Munro, Megan Robson, Manya Sellers and Lara Strongman.
Works on show include:
Arnott’s Biscuit Collection of Aboriginal bark paintings
A room is dedicated to showing a selection of Aboriginal bark paintings from the Arnott’s Collection, an important sub-collection of the MCA Collection, which comprises 275 bark paintings donated to the MCA in 1993.The display features over 60 artworks made from the 1960s to the early 1980s by important artists from the remote areas of Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land, Central Arnhem land, West Arnhem Land, Wadeye (Port Keats) and the Tiwi Islands. These works present dynamic stories and traditions from these regions and highlight the diversity of artistic practice across the bark painting tradition from northern Australia as well as the unique stylistic differences that are distinct to particular parts of Country.
Joan Brassil
Australian multimedia artist Joan Brassil was one of the first contemporary Australian artists to use sound, light and electronics with organic materials to make connections between art and the environment. An artist room is dedicated to Brassil’s installation Randomly – Now and Then (1990), a series of eight wired solid rocks connected to electronic components that cause their crystalline structures to vibrate at their resonant frequency, producing a rich soundscape of energies from the natural world.
Kevin Gilbert
Political activist, poet and visual artist Kevin Gilbert is one of the most influential Aboriginal cultural figures of the late 20th century. A room is dedicated to Gilbert’s suite of lino prints which are believed to be the first prints exhibited by an Aboriginal artist. Depicting Wiradjuri subjects, stories and heroes, the prints were made while Gilbert was incarcerated in Long Bay Gaol in the 1960s, created from basic materials including a spoon, fork, gem blades, nails and brittle lino from the prison floor. Presented alongside the prints is a large-scale reproduction of Gilbert’s seminal poem Kiacatoo (1988), acknowledging the role that the written word has played in the artist’s advocacy of Wiradjuri perspectives, stories and Country.
Tracey Moffatt
The room focused on artist Tracey Moffatt brings together two of her photographic series: Fourth (2001), a series of 26 photo silkscreen prints that depict images of athletes placed fourth at the 2000 Olympic Games, held in Sydney, and First Jobs (2008), 12 photographic prints that depict the jobs the artist held as a teenager and as an art student in Brisbane in the 1970s and early 80s. The two photographic suites are displayed in conversation with Moffatt’s video montage Artist (2000).
Leyla Stevens
A new MCA Collection acquisition on show for the first time at the Museum is Labours for Colour (2021) by Australian-Balinese artist Leyla Stevens. This dual-channel video work extends Stevens’ recent exploration of collections and museums as sites of cultural translation where diasporic objects find new conditions of value and meaning. The work tracks the making process of specialist weavers on Nusa Penida, as they produce the cepuk-style textiles for which the Indonesian island is known. Stevens brings this footage into dialogue with a private collection of South-East Asian textiles and artefacts in Sydney.
Alick Tipoti
A magnificent suite of four large-scale sculptural Mawa masks by Torres Strait Islander artist Alick Tipoti are on display which are deeply connected to Torres Strait Islander sacred men’s business and ceremony. Alongside these is Tipoti’s linocut print, Girelal (2011). Epic in scale (130 x 830cm), this is believed to be the largest print work ever produced from a single block on a single sheet. Girelal (2011) re-interprets the ancient carving practices of the Zenadh Kes and articulates the connections between Torres Strait Islander peoples and their spiritual ancestors, revealing sequences of traditional chants and songs, totems, stories and kin relationships.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia would like to thank the Major Partner of this exhibition Oceania Cruises and Supporting Partner Topspring.
The first iteration of the MCA Collection: Artists in Focus will be on display from 16 June 2023 – 10 March 2024 in the Level 2 Galleries.
About the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA)
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) is Australia’s leading museum of contemporary art, dedicated to presenting, collecting, and engaging with the art of our time. Located on the edge of Sydney Harbour, at Tallawoladah, the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, MCA Australia provides a vital platform for contemporary art and ideas in Australia and beyond. MCA Australia makes contemporary art and ideas widely accessible through its exhibitions, public engagement, learning, access, and social impact programs. The Museum’s Collection, including over 4,500 artworks, is the only public collection in Australia dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. Over a third of the Collection is represented by works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.
Images can be downloaded here.
