Eight New Melbourne Art Exhibitions Worth Rugging Up for This August
See the works of a fashion photography legend, reflect on the future of sculpture and step into a pool in the NGV.
Eight New Melbourne Art Exhibitions Worth Rugging Up for This August
See the works of a fashion photography legend, reflect on the future of sculpture and step into a pool in the NGV.
As 2017 continues to fly by, Melbourne's galleries have got your much-needed creative fix covered with a fantastic selection of contemporary art exhibitions featuring some international greats and local legends. This month, head to the Art Gallery of Ballarat to catch the photographs of fashion icon David LaChapelle, tickle your senses as sound and visuals clash in unexpected ways at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and find the best small-scale works across loads of different creative mediums for the Small Works 2017 annual event. With heaps more to choose from, August is bound to keep your creative needs topped-up and ready for the rest of the year.
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The portraits of Adelaide-based artist Joshua Miels take countless hours to come together, as he constantly adds and removes thick layers of oil paint to slowly shape his subjects’ faces. Miels’ work focuses on the mental health struggles many face in their day-to-day lives, specifically males, who he depicts throughout his abstract works. To do so, Miels creates large-scale paintings that see him digitally break his subjects down into shapes, before the intense detail is built in through endless layering and stripping back.
Miels’ work takes on a great depth — literally and figuratively — with his subjects looking emotionally detached, allowing the viewer to reflect on the difficult themes explored throughout his paintings and contemplate their own personal experiences.
Exhibiting his latest canvas works at Armadale’s Metro Gallery, Inner Thoughts is on display from Monday, August 7 until Saturday, September 2.
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In our fast paced times, this new exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) considers how technology is impacting sculptural art practice, and how sculptural works produced today might be received by those in the future. With artists from nine countries represented, Future Eaters offers a worldly perspective on contemporary sculptural practice and explores how materials, forms and artists have responded to this technological age.
Considering how sculpture has the potential to outlive its creators and become “residues of our existence”, Future Eaters abandons the typical gallery format, instead taking place in a highly architectural ‘infinite grid’ designed by artist Damiano Bertoli. In addition, MUMA has also commissioned several new artworks and installations by Bertoli and other Australian artists Benjamin Armstrong, Marley Dawson, Lewis Fidock and Joshua Petherick and Mira Gojak.
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In this period of uncertainty, how can we come together to close societal divisions, share knowledge and increase production and organisation? These are the types of questions ACCA’s Greater Together exhibition poses, suggesting our well-established ways of collaborating no longer fit the rapidly changing technologies, environments, societal and political landscapes. Utopian in its perspective, Greater Together brings together eight artist projects to consider ideas of collaboration and cooperation and how we might find solidarity in both the art world and broader society.
To help in this exploration, Melbourne-based art collective Field Theory will hold a fortnightly series of workshops, where they’ve enlisted the minds of several obscure local groups — including ex-military survivalists, the Melbourne Anarchist Club and the Victorian UFO Club — to devise a survival plan if disaster strikes.
Greater Together is open now and runs until Sunday, September 17. Be sure to head along to the Field Theory: Survival Sessions to ensure your survival bunker is well prepared.
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The 1930s in Australia was a tumultuous time — it was a decade that saw the highs of engineering marvels like the Sydney Harbour Bridge completed, but also the lows of The Great Depression, an impending Second World War and a highly conservative society. However, out of these ups and downs came one of the most important eras in Australian art history, and this period is explored in a new immersive exhibition at the NGV’s Ian Potter Centre.
Through more than 200 works across photography, painting, printmaking, fashion, architecture and more, Brave New World: Australia 1930s considers how artists responded to the social and political concerns of the time, features Australia’s pioneering female artists, who carved out a way forward in the modern art movement, and showcases those who focused hopefully on our emerging cities in their vibrancy, colour and culture.
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The splish-splash of water isn’t something you’d usually expect to find much of inside the walls of a gallery, but that’s all set to change as NGV Australia pays homage to one of our great Australian icons: the swimming pool. Opening on August 18, The Pool: Architecture, Culture and Identity will explore this cultural symbol in all its glory, with the help of a multi-sensory, 11-metre pool installation, set up within the gallery’s Design Studio.
The free interactive exhibition will play with water, sound, light and scent to highlight the connection between culture, landscape and architecture. It’ll look the real deal, too, complete with wooden decking and sun lounges — and visitors will even be allowed to dip their feet in for a refreshing paddle. This is the first time the installation has come to Australia after showing at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Further emphasising the swimming pool’s link to our national identity, eight pool ‘lanes’ will each feature an audio excerpt from a high-profile Aussie figure, sharing their own nostalgia-tinged, pool-inspired stories. This will include The Slap and Barracuda (good pre-exhibition pool-related reading, by the way) author Christos Tsiolkas and Aussie rock god Paul Kelly, through to Olympic gold medalists Shane Gould and Ian Thorpe.
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Inspired by musical scores and how sound can be physically transcribed, The Score considers how the emerging art trend of cross-disciplinary works might be further explored through colour, performance and other unexpected creative formats. As dance, music and vocal performance become increasingly often featured in visual works, The Score highlights artworks that shift between disciplines and defy our experiential expectations.
Taking up the full three floors of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, this significant international group exhibition presents numerous and varied examples of music and dance notation — from medieval manuscripts to paintings being ‘played’ by musical ensembles, hand gestures communicating sound and translating a ballerina’s emotive diary into choreography. Throughout this exhibition you’ll experience how visual metaphors can reinterpret sound, presenting new experiences for your eyes and ears.
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Having worked with a who’s who of actors, athletes and entertainers, American photographer David LaChapelle is known as one of the forefront fashion photographers of our time. Never before seen in Australia, the Art Gallery of Ballarat will host a major exhibition of LaChapelle’s most famous portraits, fashion shoots, and fine art projects. Getting his start for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine at just the age of 17, throughout a hugely successful career, LaChapelle has photographed the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Pamela Anderson, David Beckham and Madonna.
Having retired from the fashion industry in 2006, LaChapelle underwent a period of self-discovery, emerging inspired to return to fine art and commentate on social issues facing the world today. This period has seen LaChapelle produce cutting-edge photography that explores consumerism, atonement and salvation, while highlighting themes around contemporary art practice and history.
Showcasing more than 90 of his works, David LaChapelle headlines the Ballarat International Foto Biennale and runs from Saturday, August 19 until Sunday, September 17.
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Melbourne’s NGV International will celebrate the unique designs and lasting legacy of fashion icon Christian Dior, in a world premiere exhibition launching in August.
Running from August 27 to November 7, The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture will be one of three major surveys of Dior’s groundbreaking work, alongside exhibitions in Paris and New York. The Melbourne show will include more than 140 show-stopping garments, stretching the length and breadth of the label’s extraordinary history.
“Highlights of the NGV’s House of Dior exhibition will include one of the few surviving examples of Christian Dior’s New Look collection, which revitalised women’s fashion in the post-war era,” said gallery director Tony Ellwood while announcing the exhibition at a launch event earlier today. “And of course it wouldn’t be a Dior exhibition without their sculptural tailoring, their signature ball gowns and their glamorous evening dresses which have become synonymous with the fashion house.”
“Audiences will discover the nuances of Dior’s fashion design, and observe the ways in which these have evolved through the decades. The exhibition will also celebrate the milestones of Dior’s six successive designers,” he added.
A key element of the exhibition will be an exploration of Dior’s historic 1948 spring fashion parade at David Jones in Sydney, considered to be the first complete Dior collection to be shown outside of Paris. The exhibition will also tie in with the gallery’s first ever Gala Ball. “Think Met Gala, but with a Melbourne sense of style,” said Ellwood.
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