Some mysterious process

Known internationally as the ‘rainbow man’, Ay-O belongs to a generation of Japanese artists who rejected traditional woodblock printing methods in favour of screenprinting. Ay-O moved to New York in 1958 and became involved with the Fluxus movement before representing Japan at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Rainbow Hokusai, position ‘A’ is a colour screenprint based on an erotic shunga print originally thought to be by the great ukiyo-e master printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) but later reattributed to Keisai Eisen (1790–1848). To make the work, Ay-O had a reproduction of the print sent to him in the United States, cut into many pieces to avoid possible problems with customs. His version mimics this process with its assemblage of 54 separate squares.

Rainbow Hokusai, position ‘A’ was purchased on the recommendation of former Gallery director Hal Missingham AO after it was exhibited in the 7th International Biennial of Prints held in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1970–71. Ay-O was awarded the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art Prize for his contribution.

Sister Mary Corita Kent joined the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a Roman Catholic order of nuns based in Los Angeles, at the age of 18. In the 1950s she taught herself the process of screenprinting. Her early works displayed influences of abstract expressionism and Byzantine art, but after seeing Andy Warhol’s seminal Campbell’s soup cans exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, Kent’s work took on a distinctly pop appearance. Using elements drawn from songs, magazines and advertising in combination with scripture, Kent rearticulated Catholicism for the modern world through prints that became overtly activist in nature.

In 1970 Kent’s order attempted to adapt to meet the needs of contemporary society and formed the Immaculate Heart Community. These prints were acquired directly from them by our senior curator of international modern and contemporary art, Nicholas Chambers, who had come across Kent’s work in his previous role at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

White terrier was created as a part of Jeff Koons’s Made in heaven series, a body of work drawing on kitsch and erotic imagery as well as the earlier European traditions of the baroque and rococo. The polychromed wooden carving of a West Highland terrier is a particularly significant work as it was subsequently used as the basis for Koons’s monumental topiary sculpture, Puppy.

Chosen for its endearing appearance, this little sculpture was transposed into a 12.4-metre-tall dog-shaped sculptural framework covered with 60,000 flowering plants intended to communicate feelings of love, warmth and happiness. Puppy stood outside the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 1996 as the 10th Kaldor Public Art Project and is now located permanently in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. White terrier was gifted to the Gallery in 2011 as part of the John Kaldor Family Collection.

A major figure of American pop art, Roy Lichtenstein is known for his paintings and prints that mimic the graphic style and printing processes of comic strips. Dating from the early 1970s, Lichtenstein’s Bull profile series takes inspiration from Theo van Doesburg’s c1917 Composition (The cow) and Picasso’s 11 Bull lithographs from 1945. The six prints, articulated in Lichtenstein’s signature style and colour palette, explore the progression of a recognisable image from representation to abstraction.

The acquisition of this significant series, supported by the London-based (but frequent Sydney visitor) Hamish Parker, was made in 2013 with a view to filling a gap in the representation of American pop art at the Gallery, as well as strengthening our collection of works on paper.

Ed Ruscha is a key figure of the American pop art movement. Born in Oklahoma, he graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1960, before working as a graphic artist for an advertising agency while simultaneously developing his art practice. He began to explore the use of text and everyday objects after encountering the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. In our painting, the word ‘gospel’ is set diagonally across a raw canvas ground and is pierced by aluminium arrows. ‘Gospel’ carries multiple associations: from the first four books of the Christian New Testament (literally meaning ‘good news’), to more contemporary references to African-American spiritual music and the notion of absolute truth.

Gospel was acquired from the artist’s private collection in 2013, as a gift from the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales and Ed and Danna Ruscha to celebrate the 2012 appointment of Michael Brand as director of the Gallery.

At the beginning of the 1970s, following a period where filmmaking had been his core activity, Andy Warhol refocused his attention on painting and printmaking. Mao was by far his largest body of work at this time, numbering hundreds of paintings and a portfolio of ten prints. The subject was prompted by the 1971 announcement of US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, which led to the resumption of normal diplomatic relations between the two countries.

All of Warhol’s Mao works were derived from the same image – the iconic portrait of the Chinese revolutionary found inside Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, known as the ‘Little Red Book’. With images of Mao also proliferating in the American media in the early 1970s, Warhol seized upon an image that had the rare quality of being iconic both in China and the West and created what was to become one of the best-known works of pop art.