A major new Andy Warhol exhibition, a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography and work by modernist artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith are among the highlights of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 2017 program, which was announced on Tuesday.
At the launch event, Wayne Tunicliffe – the gallery’s head curator of Australian art – spoke on an issue that has been plaguing public galleries in Australia: the gender diversity among collections. “If women hold up half the sky, it’s a miracle it’s not fallen on our heads in the state and national galleries,” he said. “We are working very hard to address that situation.”
Among the Australian collection of AGNSW, Tunicliffe said that 56% of works made in the past 10 years came from women artists. He highlighted some involved in the 2017 program, including BC (formerly Brown Council), Pat Brassington and Mikala Dwyer.
Following on from the record-breaking success of the Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei show at the National Gallery of Victoria this year, Adman: Warhol Before Pop has been billed as one of the most comprehensive exhibitions assembled of the artist’s early work. Opening in February during the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Adman will showcase Warhol’s output as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, when he was commissioned by brands such as Tiffany’s, magazines including Vogue and Harper’s, leading Fifth Avenue department stores and the major art directors of Madison Avenue.
More than 200 objects will be on display from the art and archival collections of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, including rare drawings and photographs, vintage ads, recreated department store windows and artist books, which dip into the pre-Mad Men, pre-pop era of commercial art and reveal Warhol’s development as a queer artist, and his early influences of Matisse, Cocteau and Picasso.
Making Modernism, which opened at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria last week, celebrates the contribution to international modernism made by three women: two of Australia’s most celebrated 20th century artists, Preston and Cossington Smith, alongside their American peer O’Keeffe. After travelling to the Queensland Art Gallery, it will arrive at AGNSW in July.
The program launch also highlighted previous announcements for 2017, including The National, the inaugural biennale of new Australian art, which will presented over six years at AGNSW, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art; and Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, which will showcase the flourishing arts culture of 17th-century Holland, including six paintings and a dozen etchings from Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer’s portrait Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
Comprised of contemporary works that “question, contest, and provoke discussion about rights to land in Australia”, Our Lands will open in January: a pointed and political counterpoint to the Sentient Lands exhibition, which is currently on show in the Yiribana Gallery. In June, the first major exhibition of Filipino art in Australia, Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines, will open at AGNSW, as part of the Bayanihan Philippines Art Project, celebrating 70 years of diplomatic relationships between Australia and the Philippines.
Also opening in June, the AGNSW’s historic Grand Courts will be reinvented as an authentic Victorian display space, to showcase more than 80 19th-century watercolours from the gallery’s collection that are rarely displayed due to conservation difficulties.
Other exhibitions include John Olsen’s The You Beaut Country, which closes at the National Gallery of Victoria in February and opens at AGNSW in March; and Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, a major exhibition of the photographer’s still lifes, portraits, erotic imagery and rare colour photographs, which opened in Los Angeles in March and arrives in Sydney in October 2017.
