Past exhibitions and events
A series of innovative and varied exhibitions from Western Australia and around the world.
Past Exhibitions
- 2019
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HERE&NOW19: Material Culture
31 August - 7 December 2019
Established in 2012, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery's annual HERE&NOW exhibition series showcases some of the most exciting and innovative new work being produced in Western Australia.
Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art
31 August - 7 December 2019
The 1930s was a stimulating period in Australian art, defined by the effects of travel and the exchange of ideas, both artistic and political. The exhibition includes works by Lina Bryans, Grace Crowley, Ian Fairweather, James Gleeson, Nora Heysen, Frank Hinder, Ethel Spowers, and Danila Vassilieff.
Out of the Boxes and into the Desert
13 July - 7 December 2019
Out of the boxes and into the Desert explores the Berndt Museum's collection of paintings from the Central Desert.
The Artist and Her Work
25 May - 7 December 2019
Lady Sheila Cruthers took an immediate shine to women’s self-portraiture when she began collecting art in the mid-1970s. This interest expanded into a collection strategy she referred to as ‘the artist and her work’ – Lady Cruthers would collect an artist’s work in addition to a self-portrait, with the two works often hung side by side in the family home.
Phillip Noakes: Sculptural Silver
25 May - 17 August 2019
Phillip Noakes, one of the foremost silversmiths working and teaching in Australia, has dedicated much of the past few years to his passion for silversmithing. Focusing on form and enlivening his work with textures created by hammering, engraving, and filing, he has produced a magnificent and varied collection of new hollowware and sculptural objects together with a small collection of jewelry reflecting the hollow forms.
Nikulinsky Naturally
25 May - 17 August 2019
Philippa Nikulinsky AM is a Perth-based, internationally recognized botanical and wildlife artist. Nikulinsky Naturally is a survey of her work from the 1970s to the present, which provides a perspective on the unique qualities of her practice - focusing on the evolution of her working methodology and exploring the ways in which she continues to interrogate the botanical riches of the Western Australian landscape.
Carrolup Revisited: A Journey through the South West of Western Australia
9 February - 29 June 2019
Carrolup Revisited: A Journey through the South West of Western Australia celebrates the artists well-known for their role in the Carrolup School of Art. Today, this small group of children are remembered for their distinctive representational drawings in pastel. As members of the Stolen Generations, removed from their families and relocated to the Carrolup Native Settlement without warning, they lived in isolation from the world.
RITUAL at There Is Gallery
22 February - 16 March 2019
The making of art is itself ritualistic, the sequestered place is often the studio, the sequence of activities always highly individualized and motivated by a compelling rationale. All the artists invited to participate in this exhibition have explored this idea of ritual process to examine key ideas in human experience that seek knowledge, comfort, or pose questions about our identity and how we engage as social beings.
Love, Displaced
9 February - 11 May 2019
In this century, feelings of love and empathy are often filtered through social media platforms and 24-hour news cycles. In Love, Displaced, film-based and video art offers new and innovative modes of navigating the white noise of contemporary life towards places of re-sensitization and emotional engagement.
- 2018
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The Armistice Project
The University Club of Western Australia
10 November 2018 - 25 April 2019
An exhibition of University Senate, Convocation, staff, and students involved in the Great War.
Stockyards and Saddles: A Story of Gibb River Station
21 July - 8 December 2018
Stockyards and Saddles: A Story of Gibb River Station explores the lives of those living and working on the remote cattle station of Gibb River in the East Kimberley region from the early 1900s until the 1990s.
HERE&NOW18: Besides, it is always the others who die
1 September - 8 December 2018
HERE&NOW18 presents new works from Western Australian artists Dr Perdita Phillips, Dr Alex Spremberg, Carly Lynch, Peter & Molly, Julie Dowling, and Bjoern Rainer-Adamson that respond to the challenge of contemporary art set by Marcel Duchamp 100 years ago.
No Second Thoughts: Reflections on the ARTEMIS Women’s Art Forum
1 September - 8 December 2018
No Second Thoughts: Reflections on the ARTEMIS Women's Art Forum examines the production of memory and history in Western Australian feminist art practice and beyond, responding to an archive of documents produced by the organisation housed at the State Library of Western Australia. Active between 1985 and 1990, ARTEMIS aimed to raise the status of women in the arts in Perth and had over 300 members at its peak.
Stewart Scambler: Fragment
5 May - 18 August 2018
Arriving in Perth from England as a young boy, Stewart Scambler was struck by the natural environment and, in particular, the intense light of Western Australia. Both the material and aesthetic qualities of the local landscape remain central to Scambler’s practice as a potter. On his property at York in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, the artist grows trees to stoke his wood-fired kiln and collects materials to make his own clay body. His glazes take on the earthy, muted colours of the Australian bush, enlivened by tonal variation and surface markings that emerge during the firing process.
Modern Australian Landscapes, 1940s-1960s: Works from the University of Western Australia Art Collection
5 May - 18 August 2018
This exhibition explores the modern landscape tradition in Australian art, through works in the University of Western Australia Art Collection. It features paintings by Elise Blumann, Sam Fullbrook, Audrey Greenhalgh, Guy Grey-Smith, Godfrey Miller, Sidney Nolan, John Passmore, Howard Taylor, and Fred Williams.
Authentic Determination
5 May - 18 August 2018
Based in Adelaide, South Australia, Brigid Noone has expanded her painting practice into an experimental hybrid of artistic and curatorial processes, often incorporating the work of other artists into her wall paintings and installations or working collaboratively to produce co-authored exhibitions. As co-director of Fontanelle, a gallery and studio complex now located in the heritage precinct of Port Adelaide, Noone has been instrumental in recent discussions about feminism and community in contemporary Australian art.
In Light of Shadows
10 February - 7 July 2018
Notions of light and shadow occupy a space within different socio-cultural imaginings and understandings of particular realities – including ideas of knowledge, mortality, morality, power, and memory.
Zadok Ben-David: Human Nature
10 February - 21 April 2018
Take a closer look – things aren’t always quite what they seem. A suspended disc hovering above comes to life under UV light to celebrate the rhythmic beauty of nature. A field of miniature plants resembles a bush fire-ravaged landscape, only to reveal new life.
FLORA
10 February - 21 April 2018
Flowers carry a multitude of meanings and uses: they can represent love, honour or death, are used as decoration or medicine, are maligned by art historians for their ‘useless beauty’, and celebrated in science for their role in sustaining ecosystems. Often, flowers are aligned with women or with femininity, connections that colour the ways in which we value, understand, and construct our world.
- 2017
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Batavia: Giving Voice to the Voiceless
7 October - 16 December 2017
Batavia: Giving voice to the voiceless follows new discoveries by researchers from the University of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum into the 1629 wreck of the Dutch ship Batavia and the mutiny, murder, and incredible feats of survival it sparked, as reinterpreted by Paul Uhlmann and Robert Cleworth.
Being Tiwi
7 October - 16 December 2017
Being Tiwi features a range of artworks from print media to painting, and reveals how the expressive and experimental work being produced on the Tiwi Islands continues to realise in different forms the Tiwi traditions of life and culture. The exhibition includes the first prints produced at Tiwi Design, a selection of works on paper, newly acquired for the MCA Collection along with works commissioned especially for the exhibition.
Milingimbi: A Living Culture
29 July - 16 December 2017
The Berndt Museum along with the Milingimbi Aboriginal Art and Cultural Centre and the Janet Holmes à Court Collection present a selection of works from Milingimbi Island in north-east Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.
Country and Colony
22 July - 16 December 2017
Country and Colony presents a range of perspectives on the Australian experience. Drawing from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, the exhibition weaves together stories of land, body, and industry to explore histories and the ongoing impact of colonisation.
Scratching the Surface: A Selection of Works from the Janet Holmes à Court Collection
22 July - 23 September 2017
Scratching the Surface: A selection of works from the Janet Holmes à Court Collection gives audiences the chance to experience some of the best-loved works from a very personal collection of Australian art. The exhibition will also mark the release of Muse: A journey through an art collection by Janet Holmes à Court about her passion for art.
Down to Earth
23 May - 9 August 2017 at the City of Perth Library
This exhibition explores depictions of the landscape and earth, both visually and in terms of the processes through which the works were made. Down to Earth showcases ceramics from the University of Western Australia (UWA) Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at UWA, and is a UWA Away Project, in partnership with the City of Perth Library.
HERE&NOW17: New Photography
29 April - 8 July 2017
HERE&NOW17: New Photography centres on contemporary Western Australian artists working with, or at the margins of, photography. The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery’s annual HERE&NOW exhibition gives an emerging curator a chance to showcase the outstanding work of contemporary artists practising in Western Australia. Curated by Chelsea Hopper, HERE&NOW17: New Photography aims to explore how Western Australians see themselves, how artists use photography to interrogate a place’s self-representation, and attempts to disrupt the dominance of east coast imagery in the Australian cultural imagination.
Kevin Ballantine: Photographs 1986-2001
29 April - 8 July 2017
Explore Perth of the mid-1980s through to the dawn of the new millennium with photographs from Western Australian artist Kevin Ballantine.
The Likeness
11 February - 8 July 2017
Portraits and self-portraits from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, the nation's only public collection of art by Australian women.
Works of Art from Warburton
11 February - 1 July 2017
Experience work by Aboriginal artists from the remote desert community of Warburton.
Helen Britton: Interstices
11 February - 15 April 2017
A 25-year survey of the work of renowned jeweller Helen Britton, including new works that draw inspiration from Western Australia's coastline. Now residing in Munich, Britton has developed an international reputation for her innovative practice as a contemporary artist working in metal and found materials.
- 2016
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CHAR SOO
8 October - 10 December 2016
Carriageworks, Adelaide Film Festival, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art and the University of Western Australia present Hossein Valamanesh in collaboration with Nassiem Valamanesh: CHAR SOO, 2015, Produced by Felix Media.
Saltwater Mapping
8 October - 10 December 2016
Presented by the Berndt Museum - Saltwater Mapping aims to respond to the 400th anniversary of Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog’s landing in Western Australia with an exploration into the way in which humanity has mapped the WA coastline over the past four centuries.
Kelly Doley: Things Learnt About Feminism
8 October - 10 December 2016
In 2012 Australian artist Kelly Doley initiated the project The Learning Centre: Two Feminists, inviting 16 participants from different backgrounds to teach her about feminism. Thoughts, facts, and ideas from these conversations were translated into 95 hand-painted posters, transforming the live encounter between the artist and participant into an archive of feminist thought and history. Unapologetically contradictory and provocative, Kelly Doley: Things Learnt About Feminism investigates the tropes and cliches of the political poster and celebrates the strength and diversity of feminism today.
Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 - 2016
30 July - 24 September 2016
Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006 - 2016 showcases Stannage’s characteristically wry observations of life and testifies to her ongoing experimentation and innovation across a range of media. The artist utilises everyday objects to offer a commentary on fame, and the fragile and transitory nature of our time on this planet.
Mowaljarlai Vision and Voice - Legacy of a Bush Professor
23 April - 17 September 2016
Honouring the life and legacy of lawman, philosopher, artist, activist, storyteller, bush professor, and statesman, David Mowaljarlai.
HERE&NOW16 / GenYM
30 April - 16 July 2016
A firsthand look at being young and Muslim in modern Australia. Presenting nine contemporary artists whose otherwise diverse work is tied together by their experiences of being young and Muslim in Australia. The featured artists are (almost) all members of ‘Generation Y’, growing up or migrating to Australia in the 1990s and early 2000s, and their work reflects lives spent living with and challenging a ‘post-9/11’ construction of Muslim identity.
Julie Gough: Collisions
30 April - 16 July 2016
Exploring contact and colonisation with the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. Julie Gough is an acclaimed artist, writer, and curator who has participated in over 120 exhibitions since 1994. Collisions features works by Gough that examine points of contact between Australian Indigenous heritage and colonial history, often drawing from her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
INTERWOVEN
18 February - 9 April 2016
Revealing Aboriginal, Melanesian and Southeast Asian art from the Berndt Museum. Via the intertwining of fibre, feather, paper, recycled blankets, string, seeds and other qualitative materials, Interwoven brings to life a series of items created by generations of culturally distinctive makers from Aboriginal Australia, Melanesia and South-east Asian settings.
Bharti Kher: In Her Own Language
Thursday 18 February - Saturday 16 April 2016
In her first solo exhibition in Australia, internationally acclaimed artist Bharti Kher offers a window into her richly textured practice. Her distinctive signature application of saris, bindis, and moulded forms is on display in a selection of wall works and sculptures that imply a narrative. Kher’s elegant yet diverse work is visceral and allegorical, stemming from the pulse of her New Delhi studio and informed by a curious and cognisant imperative.
- 2015
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DeMonstrable
3 October - 5 December 2015
DeMonstrable, curated by SymbioticA Director Oron Catts with Associate Professors Jennifer Johung and Elizabeth Stephens, is an event set to commemorate, respond to, and reflect on the multifaceted cultural and scientific impact of the Earmouse. New work commissioned for this exhibition is presented together with 20 years of artistic, scientific and popular culture responses to the Earmouse.
OBJECT LESSONS III: Pattern Recognition
3 October - 5 December 2015
OBJECT LESSONS III: Pattern Recognition is the final chapter in a year-long, three-part exhibition of contemporary art from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.
WARMUN THEN AND NOW
30 June - 12 December 2015
WARMUN THEN AND NOW will creatively coalesce and celebrate powerful artistic personalities of the past, including Rover Thomas and Queenie McKenzie, by bringing their work into conversation with the contemporary work of Rusty Peters, Lena Nyadbi and others.
Elise Blumann: An Émigré Artist in Western Australia, 1938 - 1948
11 July - 19 September 2015
This exhibition concentrates on ten years of Elise Blumann’s art practice, from the series of bold portraits produced in the late 1930s to the increasingly abstract renderings of the landscape in the late 1940s.
OBJECT LESSONS II: Curtain Situations
11 July - 19 September 2015
OBJECT LESSONS II: Curtain Situations is the second in a three-part exhibition at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in 2015 showcasing contemporary art from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. Building on OBJECT LESSONS I: Painting, this exhibition continues to examine dialogues around painting in a contemporary, multi-disciplinary field, particularly the ongoing tension between the medium's sculptural and representational qualities.
HERE&NOW15
28 April - 27 June 2015
HERE&NOW is a series of annual exhibitions presented at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery aimed at showcasing the outstanding work of contemporary Western Australian artists. Like its predecessors in the series, HERE&NOW15 aims to set a new benchmark of exemplary creativity and provide a snapshot of the most interesting and challenging artists working here and now. In the twentieth century, the conception of sculptural practice expanded to include architectural intervention and land art.
Object Lessons
28 April - 5 December 2015
OBJECT LESSONS is an exhibition in three parts, unfolding over three consecutive exhibition periods in the Lady Sheila Cruthers Gallery. Each discrete ‘chapter’ presents contemporary art from the CCWA in which the fundamental properties of the art object and experience are used to address enduring questions of representation, perception and the role art in society.
Yirrkala Drawings
Selection of works on show until 20 June 2015
Berndt Museum
Imagine a 1940s Yolngu Community in north-east Arnhem Land. Imagine people's daily lives, traditional lands, artworks, and cultural histories; imagine interactions with Macassans before European colonisation. This exhibition privileges audiences by taking them beyond their imagination into a Yolngu worldview and landscape.
- 2014
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Memento Mori
18 October - 13 December 2014
In the midst of life we are in death. Memento Mori are artworks that prompt us to ponder the emptiness and transience of earthly pleasures and re-assess our moral progress as we move toward the certainty of death.
Self Portrait as Shared Dream
18 October - 13 December 2014
Cruthers Collection of Women's Art
Self Portrait as Shared Dream is a play on the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art’s strong thematic focus on self-portraiture. Instead of attempting to express the ‘individuality’ of the subject, the exhibition presents a collection of works in which the individual is a collective construction, a figure forged from common histories, pop culture references and institutional memories.
Wildflower Dreaming: Shirley Corunna and the Coolbaroo League 1952 – 1962
15 July - 13 December 2014
In 1952, at the age of 17, Shirley Corunna (nee Bynder) a young Yamatji woman moved from her home in Three Springs to Perth. This exhibition celebrates Shirley's journey of discovery and independence and provides a snapshot of the social life of Aboriginal people living in the city during the 1950s.
Glitter: Pat Larter vs Lola Ryan
26 July - 27 September 2014
Cruthers Collection of Women's Art
Pat Larter is better known as a muse for her husband, Australian pop artist Richard Larter, than for her own paintings and collages. Lola Ryan’s shellwork harbour bridges, boxes and wall hangings, which continue an indigenous tradition particular to La Perouse near Sydney, were for many years considered part of a souvenir trade rather than an art history.
HERE&NOW14
26 July - 27 September 2014
HERE&NOW14 presents an exciting exhibition of contemporary ceramic work from both emerging and established Western Australian artists.
p a n o r a m a
3 May - 12 July 2014
In 1792, the Scottish entrepreneur Robert Barker merged the Greek word pan (all) with hórãma (view) when he was searching for a word to describe his 360 by 180 degree painting of the city of Edinburgh. Like all successful inventions, the panorama was of its time and reflected the growing interest in communing with the natural world and travelling to exotic places.
Transcending Borders
3 May - 12 July 2014
Transcending Borders gives visual form to the developing cross-cultural relationships between South Korea and Western Australia.
Worldwide Backyard
3 May - 12 July 2014
Cruthers Collection of Women's Art
The landscape and the natural world have been a long-time preoccupation of artists, but the means by which they are depicted are subject to complex cultural influences.
Ukiyo-e: Japanese prints of the floating world
8 February - 28 June 2014
Japanese woodblock prints from the Ronald and Catherine Berndt Collection. The techniques of Japanese woodblock printing, moku hanga, is identified most closely with the genre of art Ukiyo-e, commonly translated as 'pictures of the floating world'. This was adopted from the Chinese book printing techniques during the Edo period (1603 - 1867) and developed into a distinctive art form, using water-based inks to provide a wide range of vivid colours possessing extraordinary transparency.
Anne Ferran: Shadow Land
8 February - 19 April 2014
A Perth International Arts Festival event supported by the Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmer Arts. Shadow Land is a survey exhibition of Anne Ferran’s most significant projects and series, spanning more than 30 years.
- 2013
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Stan Hopewell: God is Love
12 October - 14 December 2013
Stan Hopewell began to make paintings during his wife Joyce's illness. The hundreds of paintings he created record important events in his life, in the life of his wife, and most importantly, in works that give visual form to the ineffable presences of God. That intimate spiritual relationship guided Hopewell through a life that has not been without hardship and challenge. His faith sustained him through the three years of his wife's serious medical condition but, when she died, Hopewell stopped painting. Ted Snell's monograph on the artist Stan Hopewell: facing the stars will be published by UWA Publishing in tandem with the exhibition.
Bliss: [Painting/Photography/Objects] + [Video Art]
12 October - 14 December 2013
This exhibition considers how contemporary artists create an ideal reality- in the form of constructed worlds that transcend our daily experience, or by considering the beauty found in familiar places or things. Focus is on the object in space and installation work which communicates a sense of order, balance and wonder.
People who you can't meet face to face: The Australian doll
12 October - 14 December 2013
Cruthers Collection of Women's Art
People who you can't meet face to face features work from Indigenous artists from around Australia, juxtaposing tactile object and photographic image to examine the motif of the doll in a variety of contexts.
Music Dance Landscape Image
1 November - 14 December 2013
John Blacking in Southern and Eastern Africa 1955-66. Experience the sights and sounds of Africa through the lens of world-renowned ethnomusicologist John Blacking. Music Dance Landscape Image uses the John Blacking Collection, housed at The University of Western Australia’s Callaway Centre, to provide snapshots of performances that Blacking encountered during his travels in southern and eastern Africa.
Little Paintings, Big Stories: Gossip Songs of Western Arnhem Land
29 June - 14 December 2013
From the Berndt Museum Collection. This exhibition explores the inter-relationship between the people, country and stories of Goulburn Island, Northern Territory, as they were in the past and as they are now. Bark paintings, photographs and sound recordings from the collection convey the richness of djurrbilk or gossip songs.
Abstracting the Collection
27 July - 28 September 2013
From the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art. Abstracting the Collection explores a variety of approaches to abstraction in contemporary painting, from the optical to the conceptual. Linked by an emphasis on the grid or repeated pattern and a lyrical, textural approach to colour and form, works take inspiration from a variety of sources including nature, textile design and from data collected from books and texts.
HERE&NOW13
27 July - 28 September 2013
HERE&NOW13 presents Western Australian contemporary art created by people with disability. The project is a partnership between DAADA, the Department of Culture and the Arts, the Disability Services Commission, Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Central Institute of Technology, the Museum of Modern Art, the League Artists Natural Design Studio and Gallery in New York, and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.
ORIENTing
4 May - 13 July 2013
The exhibition considers the work of Ian Fairweather and his relationship with Asia, investigating the artist's unique positioning in Australian art history and his commitment to cross-cultural engagement.
Towards Perth: Western Australian Women Artists Before 1950
4 May - 13 July 2013
Drawn from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art and The University of Western Australia Art Collection. Towards Perth includes works by Jean Appleton, Portia Bennett, Elizabeth Blair Barber, Elise Blumann, Audrey Greenhalgh, Edith Trethowan and Rose Walker - who were all active members of Perth artist societies and produced landscapes, seascapes and depictions of Perth that were informed by their exposure to modernist ideas.
Through the Kunai Grass: Portraits of the New Guinea Highlands 1951-53
8 February 2013 - 1 June 2013
This exhibition showcases the work of Ronald and Catherine Berndt while they travelled to Papua New Guinea in 1951. See previously unknown photographs recorded by Ronald and Catherine during this time.
LUMINOUSFLUX: light works
8 February 2013 - 20 April 2013
LUMINOUSFLUX examines the variety of ways in which local and international artists harness the magical palette of light. Many employ neon as a major mode of expression, whilst others utilise light-boxes, reflective surfaces, or incorporate light into installation works to create emotionally powerful and formally innovative works.
DARK PORTALS: Sera Waters
8 February 2013 - 20 April 2013
DARK PORTALS is a mysterious exhibition where the strategy of traditional embroidery techniques relay the multi-layered reinterpretations in the work of a contemporary artist.
- 2012
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LOOK. LOOK AGAIN
LOOK. LOOK AGAIN is a unique survey exhibition of historic and contemporary works of art made by women in Australia. Featuring 140 artworks from 80 artists drawn from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, this exhibition provides an alternative frame of reference for engaging with Australian history and culture.
HERE&NOW12
HERE&NOW12 is the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery’s inaugural annual exhibition of early-career, contemporary Western Australian artists. It surveys the activities of artist-run initiatives (ARIs) and places craft-based practices and DIY endeavours within the scope of the Gallery, presenting an experimental and interconnected system of art making unique to this time and this place – Western Australia, 2012.
Perth '62: Empire and Universe
Featuring a diverse collection of paintings, photographs, ceramics, models and ephemera, Perth ’62: Empire and Universe analyses the year through the gaze of local artists, architects and social historians. These range from the Modernist built statements of Council House, the Perry Lakes Stadium and the athlete’s village at Floreat, to the paintings by such luminaries as Guy Grey-Smith, Sam Fullbrook, Tom Gibbons and Elizabeth Durack; the photographs of social gatherings by Richard Woldendorp, and ceramics by Heather McSwain and Flora Landells.
Beyond Likeness: Contemporary Portraits
This exhibition examined the process of revelatory portraiture through the work of local, national and international artists. These artists all strive to know more about their sitters and to represent that knowledge to an audience by employing the technologies available to them, whether paint, photography or film. As well as showcasing the works of renowned artists, Beyond Likeness also featured some high-profile sitters, including Brad Pitt and Perth's own Heath Ledger.
Julie Dowling: Family and Friends
Julie Dowling's early interest in portraiture was triggered by her family's quest to reclaim their history and reconnect with those family members who had been separated or lost to each other as members of the Stolen Generation. Drawing on artworks from 1995 to 2008, Julie Dowling: Family and Friends was an exhibition that charted the vast breadth of issues that drive Dowling's practice - racism, broken families, personal histories and the environment.
Purnu, Tjanpi, Canvas. Art of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands
Purnu, Tjanpi, Canvas. Art of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands demonstrated the dynamic creativity of the Western Desert's Ngaanyatjarra artists. The exhibition featured recent Yarnangu acrylic painting in context with the enduring tradition of purnu (wood carving) and tjanpi (grass weaving), providing a new lens through which to better understand the inventiveness and artistry of these desert people.
- 2011
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Recent Past: Australian Painting of the 70s and 80s
Curated by John Barrett-Lenard, Recent Past was a survey of the work of 36 artists from the University of Western Australia's collection of big, bold and engaging painting. Exploring important ideas from a critical era of Australia's history, Recent Past sampled abstract, figurative and neo-expressionist forms, and included Sydney Ball, Lidija Dombrovska Laren, Sydney Nolan and Carol Rudyard.
reconnaissance
Curated by Dr Annette Pedersen, reconnaissance features works by five Australian artists who share a strong interest in issues of social justice both in Australia and abroad. Pedersen’s concept for the exhibition originates in Bob Birch’s blog, Through Australian Eyes. Birch’s blog features photographs that document his experiences in the occupied West Bank over the past few years. His images raise a myriad of issues, and reveal the reality of what it is like to live in a situation of essential statelessness.
- 2010
- 2009
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Conversations: 100 artists in the UWA Art Collection
Selection of works by 100 artists, spanning more than a century, which provided a broad overview of Australian art in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Transient States: Western Australian photography
Eleven photographers provided a range of creative responses to the urban landscape of Perth, a city whose physical fabric appears to be in a state of continual and often radical transition.
Imants Tillers: The long poem
While he has strongly influenced Australian art since the early 1980s, this was the first significant exhibition of his work to be held in Western Australia.
- 2008
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Creating taste: the collection of Joe and Rose Skinner
Works that featured Australian and Western Australian artists who came to prominence in the 1950's and 1960's.
OCEAN to OUTBACK: Australian landscape painting 1850-1950
Works that featured iconic Australian landscape artists from the National Gallery of Australia.
God-favoured, Rodney Glick: Surveyed
Art works ranging across the last 15 years of renowned West Australian artist Rodney Glick's practice, in a typically idiosyncratic mix of sculpture, installation, photography and publications.
Style and Synthesis: nine Australian moderns
The notion of modernism with works by Australian artists from the early to mid-twentieth century.
Moving forward: recent acquisitions in the UWA Art Collection
A selection of works that had been acquired in the last three years by the University of Western Australia for its art collection.
- 2007
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Creating taste: the collection of Joe and Rose Skinner
Australian and Western Australian artists who came to prominence in the 1950's and 1960's.
The system of nature
A look, through the work of eight contemporary Australian artists, at how names and texts enter into nature.
Western Desert Mob: Kutju—One
Inaugural exhibition of the Western Desert Mob artists from the Aboriginal communities located in the remote Ngaanyatjarra Lands, Western Australia.
- 2006
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One thing after another: sets & series in Australian art
Extended series of works or prints, paintings, and photographs, rarely seen in their entirety, by key Australian artists, including Sidney Nolan, Max Pam, Guy Grey-Smith, Miriam Stannage, Fred Williams, and Eveline Kotai.
Picturing the Sea
Seascapes, coastal landscapes, and images of human interaction with the sea, which included two world maps from 1571 and 1723 charting what was then known of the world and its oceans, a beautifully crafted pearl pendant, and decorated trochus shells from the Bardi Aboriginal community in the Kimberley.
Configured: Aspects of contemporary Western Australian figurative art
Contemporary representational painting curated by Perth artist Kevin Robertson, situating current figurative practice in a distinctly postmodern context by selecting artists who re-work images from the past and explore contemporary imagery.
Transience: figurative art in new hands
The work of a small number of very recent graduates from the three university art schools in Perth, all of whom use figurative techniques. Their work can be characterised by a shared interest in small worlds, domestic and personal, and in memory, reminiscence, and impermanence.
No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi
An exhibition of bark paintings and remarkable sculptures that celebrated the art and life of David Malangi Daymirringu (1927-1999) and his important role in Australia’s cultural heritage.
CRASH (and other earthly pleasures)
Drawn in part on JG Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, CRASH looked to excess, to breakdown, and to collapse, even as it explored various aspects of desire.
- 2005
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John Peart: Paintings 1964-2004
A major travelling retrospective of this important Australian painter which covered the breadth of Peart's career, with major paintings drawn from a host of public and private collections.
flux2: new art from Western Australia
An exploration of the ways in which young artists are responding to a world in flux, in which change seems to be the only constant and existing structures are continually melting, fusing, and forming new combinations.
A partial view: Australian art in the UWA Art Collection
Based around the first major book on the UWA Art Collection, launched during the exhibition, this exhibition featured 100 works from the collection, including iconic paintings by Sidney Nolan and many other Australian and Western Australian artists.
Gnarlung Wirn, Gnarlung Ngark, Gnarlung Boodja: our spirit, our mother, our country
Paintings by both Aboriginal and Balinese artists that focus on indigenous understandings of the need for careful maintenance and respect of land, as part of the Universal Relationships and Responsibilities symposium organised by the School of Indigenous Studies at UWA.
A Parched Progress: Landscapes of Australia
Australian artists picture the country in landscapes that are dominated by the structures of industrial might and European narratives of expansion. These are alien landscapes, parched by the push for economic progress, and the marginalisation of other, including indigenous, value systems.
Wolfgang Laib Passageway-Overgoing
Wolfgang Laib created fields of light, immaterial and unresolvable, with golden yellow pollen, beeswax ships that floated through the air and pools of milk and marble which glowed with an inner light in an art which is a meditation on nature and connection.
- 2004
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Clouded Over
In this examination of clouds in contemporary Australian and historical European art, Clouded Over was an expression of the continuity and adaptation of western landscape traditions.
BIO-DIFFERENCE: the Political Ecology
Ideas concerning relationships with living systems and the interconnectivity of the different levels of life explored through an array of voices and discourses not usually explored in biological art exhibitions, focusing on two intertwining streams—an ecological perspective and living/made interfaces.
Approaches to Modernism
Aspects of modernist art in Perth from the 1930s to 1950s through three of the principal exponents of the movement: Portia Bennett, Elise Blumann, and Iris Francis.
Threading Cultures
Indonesian textiles and Balinese art drawn from private collections in Perth, Western Australia, which highlighted the creativity and skill of Indonesian artists and the continuity of their artistic and cultural practice across the 20th century to the present.
Dreaming the Dreaming: The Kurrirr Kurrirr Cycle from Warmun
Paintings from the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. The Kurirr Kurirr is an Indigenous narrative dance cycle, originally dreamt by Rover Thomas and painted by Thomas and Paddy Tjamitji.
Pri-mates: Lisa Roet
Lisa's giant drawings of an orang-utan's hand, bronze busts of chimpanzees, and photographs of the interaction between ape and human are intimate, compelling, and bizarre, pointing to the close and complex relationships between humans and apes, self and other.