On display at the Bendigo Art Gallery is a selection works from the collection focusing on key movements in Australian art and design that defied mainstream culture of the mid-twentieth century.
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In 1960, influential architect Robyn Boyd published the seminal best-selling text The Australian Ugliness.
The book offered a scathing critique on the Australian aesthetic - heavily influenced by English and American styles of decoration: 'The basis of the Australian ugliness,' Boyd wrote, 'is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle-as she estimates the middle-of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.'
In spite of this 'middling' appropriation of other western cultures, a distinctly Australian vernacular was emerging within artistic communities.
This display celebrates the alternative narratives of pioneering female modernists, a renewed focus on our relationship with the urban and natural environment, the ground-breaking studio of Albert Namatjira, a revival in ceramics and early movements in conceptual art and geometric abstraction.
Namatjira was a Western Arrernte-speaking Aboriginal man from the MacDonnell Ranges, of Central Australia who became the most famous Indigenous artist of his generation, leaving a strong legacy that resonates to this day and is evident here in the works of his peers and relatives.
Namatjira grew up in the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission where in 1934 he encountered the watercolour landscapes of artist and traveller Rex Battarbee.
Taken by Batterbee's European depictions of the landscape, Namatjira taught himself how to use watercolours, later accompanying Batterbee on a painting trip through the Western MacDonnell Ranges.
What followed was an outpouring of luminous landscapes capturing the ethereal hues of the central Australian desert from dawn to dusk.
While formally Namatjiras compositions were 'conventional' landscapes referencing the structure of European composition, Namatjira imbued his works with a deeper spiritual connection and knowledge of the land that have since been re-evaluated as implicit expressions of traditional sites and sacred knowledge.
Jessica Bridgfoot, Bendigo Art Gallery curator