Some mysterious process

Personal, provocative and confronting, Tracey Emin’s multi-media oeuvre reads like a dramatic autobiography that publicly exposes intimate experiences from different periods of the artist’s life. Emin takes difficult or controversial subjects and strips them bare, addressing alcoholism, sexuality, violence, promiscuity and abortion with a brutally honest, unflinching gaze. Here, Emin has used an old pink blanket as a base for patch-worked and appliquéd text that begins ‘I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone’. In a 2015 interview, Emin noted that the title is not a negative prediction, but sadly a statement of fact.

Originally purchased in 2003 by Geoff Ainsworth AM, I do not expect was featured in Emin’s 2011 retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery titled Love is what you want before being gifted to the Gallery in 2018.

Mimmo Paladino’s work combines classical mythology and religious iconography with a style influenced by ancient Roman and Etruscan art. In the 1970s and 1980s he was a member of the Transavantgarde, an Italian art movement that sought to revive expressionism through a return to figuration, emotion and mysticism. In Cordoba, two figures are locked in a violent struggle, alongside an upside-down image that appears to reference Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The scream. Together they present an ambiguous series of clues that offer multiple avenues of interpretation. Cordoba was painted at the peak of Paladino’s international career, just four years after he participated in the Venice Biennale with other key exponents of the Transavantgarde movement.

Our painting was included in a major retrospective exhibition of Paladino’s work at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich in 1985, shortly after being in an exhibition of contemporary German and Italian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto

Drawing on her personal history, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo creates emotionally and politically charged sculptures and installations. She often uses objects that have acquired meaning through familiarity and everyday use, with many works giving physical shape to the trauma of loss and grief. Untitled is part of an ongoing series commenced in the 1990s in which Salcedo collected wooden furniture items and filled them with concrete. These structures that once held possessions used in the course of ordinary lives are repurposed and sealed up like tombs. Untitled also features fabric embedded in the cement. The textiles allude to the absence of the people who once used these objects and the devastating effects of the Colombian civil war on the civilian population.

Another work by Salcedo, Atrabiliarios 1992–97, had already been acquired by the Gallery after it was included in The boundary rider, an exhibition curated by Anthony Bond as part of 9th Biennale of Sydney in 1992–93.

Miriam Schapiro began her career as a member of the second generation of abstract expressionists in New York, but during the 1960s she began to move toward a more geometric style of painting. After relocating to California, she met fellow artist Judy Chicago with whom she established the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. Schapiro began to experiment with fabric collage in the 1970s, incorporating sewing and decorative elements with materials and techniques traditionally regarded as domestic or feminine.

By the time she created Black bolero in 1980, Schapiro was well known for her fabric collage works, which she called ‘femmages’. These works brought together feminist art and the so-called Pattern and Decoration movement in a deliberate attempt to elevate craft to the realm of ‘high art’. Black bolero was acquired by the Gallery after it featured in the 4th Biennale of Sydney titled Vision in disbelief, curated by William Wright, after which he was appointed deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Shahzia Sikander was formally trained in the Persian and Mughal art of miniature painting at Pakistan’s National College of Art in Lahore. Her work explores the historical significance of this tradition while also referencing contemporary art and society. Blending Muslim, Hindu and Western imagery, The illustrated page (edition #2) appears as an open book with two large ‘pages’ presented in a single frame. Working from a patterned silkscreen base, Sikander uses watercolour and gold-leaf detail to establish her narrative elements.

The illustrated page (edition #2) is one of three unique works on paper created by Sikander during a collaborative residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. The Gallery acquired the work after it was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2007 in Sikander’s first Australian solo exhibition. VisAsia, which provided the funds for this acquisition, was founded in 1999 to support Asian art exhibitions and educational programs at the Gallery.

Zhang Xiaogang is considered a leading artist of the Chinese avant-garde. Trained as an oil painter at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, his career mirrors the growth and development of Chinese contemporary art over the past four decades. The boy who sticks out his tongue from 2001 is part of Xiaogang’s Amnesia and memory series, a collection of paintings in which the artist focuses on the history of the individual, rather than that of the collective, or China’s past more broadly. Our painting has a slightly blurred, dreamlike quality reminiscent of old family photographs. Xiaogang has deliberately avoided colour to distance the subject from reality, recalling the nostalgia so often attached to memories of past eras.

The boy who sticks out his tongue was acquired for the Gallery collection in 2002 under the auspices of former director Edmund Capon and former curator Anthony Bond.