Some mysterious process

Louise Bourgeois worked across a variety of media over her 80-year career, but is perhaps best-known for her sculptures and installations. A life-long advocate and patient of psychoanalysis, Bourgeois was influenced by her personal experiences, with the process of artistic creation serving as a means for exploring the self. Featuring strong sexual, emotional and psychological overtones, Arched figure is based on a plaster cast of the body of Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ close friend and assistant from 1980 until the artist’s death in 2010. The blanket covering the mattress is from Bourgeois’ collection of fabrics, a vestige of her family’s history in tapestry restoration.

Arched figure was purchased in 2016 with funds provided by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation, following a 2015 benefaction tour to New York led by Justin Paton, the Gallery’s head of international art. As part of the tour, the group visited the artist’s former home and studio now maintained by the Easton Foundation.

A largely self-taught painter, Philip Guston was a contemporary of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, all of whom had studios in the same Tenth Street building in New York City in the 1940s. Guston’s early works were painted in a social realist style, influenced by both his love of Renaissance art and travels through Mexico to study anti-war murals. His paintings moved toward abstract expressionism in the 1940s, before shifting back to figuration in the late 1960s, which initially shocked the art world.

East Tenth portrays a stereotypically gritty New York scene, showing a smoggy sky above the red brick walls of a seedy, spider-infested back alley littered with bottles and debris. The title refers to the location of Guston’s studio at the beginning of his career. Acquired in 1988, East Tenth was the fourth work to be purchased with funds raised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation.

Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, David Hockney’s oeuvre includes photography, painting, printmaking and stage design. Hockney was a significant figure in the international pop art movement during the 1960s and he has continued to work prolifically throughout his career, constantly reinventing his artistic practice. In 2005, after travelling across Europe, Hockney returned to Yorkshire to paint the landscapes of his childhood, noting, ‘To do landscapes, you’ve got to know the place rather well. You’ve got to love it, actually’. A closer winter tunnel, February–March was the first of a series of landscapes Hockney painted on multiple panels while working en plein air in Yorkshire in 2006.

The painting first appeared in a 2006 exhibition titled David Hockney: a year in Yorkshire at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, after which it was acquired by the Gallery. It has since been lent by the Gallery to major Hockney exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Guggenheim, Bilbao; Tate Britain, London; Seoul Museum of Art; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Gerhard Richter’s early works were often based on black-and-white images from newspapers, books and family albums as a means of exploring the relationship between photography and painting. After replicating a photograph precisely, Richter would then blur the painted surface with a brush or sponge to lend the image a sense of anonymity. Over time Richter began to experiment with abstraction in an ongoing series of paintings made in parallel to his representational works. In Abstract painting (812), Richter has overpainted a darker underlying composition, dragging a rich yellow across the surface of the canvas with a squeegee.

The title of our painting, Abstract painting (812), gives little indication as to its inspiration, other than the number 812 which locates its position in the chronological list the artist has kept since 1963. It was acquired with support from the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation after former Gallery director Edmund Capon and former curator Anthony Bond viewed the work in London.

Cy Twombly spent much of his life living between Italy and his studio in Virginia in the United States. As a result, his art combined the history and beauty of European painting traditions with the movement and spontaneity of abstract expressionism.

Painted between 1998 and 1999, our triptych began its existence as three independent canvases featuring ancient ships and vessels. They were later brought together with a reference to JMW Turner’s 1838 painting The fighting Temeraire, which depicts the Royal Navy vessel being towed to her final berth and inevitable destruction.

Three studies from the Temeraire were painted during Twombly’s time as an artist in residence at the National Gallery in London and was exhibited alongside Turner’s painting there in the 2000 exhibition Encounters: new art from old. It was acquired for the Gallery’s collection in 2004 after a major fundraising campaign driven by former director Edmund Capon.

Jeff Wall’s large-scale photographs take inspiration from advertising, popular culture, cinema and art history. He recreates complex scenes based on his memory of an experience, rather than using a camera to capture a single moment or event. Summer afternoons presents the viewer with a constructed world where the placement of every element is carefully considered and controlled. It thereby exposes and undermines the assumption that a photograph shows events exactly as they happened. Despite the nude figures and implication of a sexual encounter, Wall creates an open-ended scenario that the viewer is invited to decipher for themselves.

The Gallery acquired Summer afternoons with the support of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation in 2014 while it was still part of an exhibition shared between the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen. It was first inspected at a warehouse near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport while the exhibition was between two of its venues.