10/11/13 200 years of Australian art on show in London - Yahoo News

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By A||ce R|tch|e
September 18, 2013 6:30 AM
200 years of Austra||an art on show |n |ondon
A major exhibition of Australian art opens in London on
Saturday, charting 200 years of extraordinary change
through the country's relationship with its dramatic
landscape.
Twelve rooms at the Royal Academy have been taken over
for the show, which includes bark paintings, early colonial
watercolours, heroic pioneer scenes and modern works.
The landscape forms a thread that links them all together,
from the inhospitable bush portrayed by the early settlers to
the abstract indigenous paintings of ceremonial places.
"Two hundred years is a lot of ground to cover," said Kathleen Soriano, the Royal Academy's director of
exhibitions.
The exhibition is largely chronological, although it begins with a room of modern interpretations of tens of
thousands of years of Aboriginal art, containing rock engravings, body paintings and ceremonial ground
designs.
"The first room represents 50,000 years of a culture," Soriano explained.
ln one of the most comprehensive surveys of Australian art seen outside the country, the 200 works by 146
artists shine a light on the diversity of its people, its land and how it became the nation it is today.
The earliest colonial art shows a wariness of Australia's terrain, which the first British settlers in 1788 found
hard to cultivate, portraying settlements as bright spots in a dark and dangerous landscape.
But the paintings chart how those who survived built railways and raised cattle, and finally began to enjoy
the views -- and the beach.
Many early works are watercolours in the English tradition, but after the gold rush other Europeans and
Chinese began arriving, bringing different styles with them.
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10/11/13 200 years of Australian art on show in London - Yahoo News
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Some artists acknowledged the price the indigenous people
paid for the colonial expansion, including Eugene von
Guerard in his "Stony Rises" (1857j, which shows a group of
Aborigines cast in darkness as the sun sets.
"lt's the sun setting on the Aboriginal people," said Ron
Radford, director of the National Gallery of Australia who co-
curated the show.
The exhibition showcases some spectacular Aboriginal art,
including eucalyptus bark paintings from Arnhem Land,
northern Australia, and works by Albert Namatjira, who
learned watercolours while acting as a guide and painted some of the earliest and most striking pictures of
the Australian desert.
There are works from the 1970s, when Aboriginal men in the Western Desert began to paint their mythology
or "dreaming" on discarded building materials, and more modern paintings such as Anatjari Tjampitjinpa's
concentric circles from 1981, depicting ceremonial grounds in central Australia.
The exhibition also looks at the establishment of the landscape as part of Australian identity, with pictures
celebrating the heroism and strength of those forging a new life in rugged terrain.
Frederick McCubbin's 1904 triptych "The Pioneer" shows a young couple starting out with only a wagon,
then with a homestead and a child, and finally the son at his father's grave, a new town in the distance.
Four decades later, Sidney Nolan presented his vision of Ned Kelly, an outlaw character similar to England's
Robin Hood, outwitting the comically stupid police.
By the 1960s, the landscape had been distorted, as shown by Fred Williams' "Yellow Landscape", which
discarded the horizon and depicted trees as mere dots and dashes of paint against a rusty background.
The exhibition closes with modern works, from Peter Dombrovskis's famous photograph of the Franklin
River, which became a symbol for the green movement in the 1980s, to Fiona Hall's sardine tins, each with
a lid moulded into a plant and a sex act depicted inside the aluminium container.
"Australia" runs from September 21 to December 8.
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A visitor views a painting by Australian artist Frederick
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