EXHIBITIONS From The State Art Collection
Your Collection 1800 - today
Your Collection marks a new beginning for the presentation of the State Art Collection. For the first time in the Gallery’s history, the Collection will be presented in a series of interconnected chronological displays, starting in the Centenary Galleries and from 2011 progressively throughout the entire ground floor of the main Gallery. Your Collection features highlights of Indigenous, Western Australian, Australian and global art and design from three centuries.
Edith and Nelson Dawson
Triptych c1904
wrought and forged iron, steel, silver mounts and enamel
68.5cm (height)
State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Purchased 1904
Vast: north-west landscapes
26 October 2011 – 18 March 2012
The opening up of northern Western Australia to mining exploration in the 1960s also opened up this terrain to artists – both literally by providing easier ways to access it physically by car and air, and imaginatively as a ‘new world’ to discover. Australian artists Russell Drysdale, Guy Grey-Smith, Robert Juniper, Sidney Nolan and many others travelled through the area at this time, and their practice often changed significantly as a result.
Guy Grey-Smith
Skull Springs country 1966
oil and beeswax emulsion on hardboard
122 x 183 cm
State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Purchased 1967
William Kentridge Shadow quartet
Shadow quartet forms an ensemble of four individual sculptures; each one of the figures is actually a cluster of multiple shadow figures with different personas that appear and disappear as you move around and between them. Ambiguity, recognition and deception are intertwined in Shadow quartet, as each sculpture morphs playfully from one persona to another, from one individual to many, changing before your eyes – animated by your movement. Shadow quartet therefore creates continuous and surprising perceptual discoveries of recognition and transformations, and great visual pleasure.
William Kentridge
Shadow quartet 2003-2004
bronze, edition 1/4
(quartet 1) 271.0 x 127.0 x 156.0 cm; (quartet 2) 272.0 x 144.0 x 150.0 cm;
(quartet 3) 292.0 x 121.0 x 127.0 cm; (quartet 4) 252.0 x 105.0 x 157.0 cm
State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Commissioned with funds from the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2002.
Principally supported by Wesfarmers Limited, the Friends of the Art Gallery and Janet Holmes à Court.
Last reviewed 29 November 2011
