Art Sets.
Recent Australian art acquisitions
Print this setBy the Art Gallery of NSW
AGNSW collection John Russell In the afternoon 1891
Australian artist John Russell was a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and knew Claude Monet and many other French Impressionist artists. He became the only Australian artist to work in a relatively pure French Impressionist style, later developing his own more expressive and individual post-Impressionist style.
In the afternoon is one of two works that Russell exhibited in London in the New English Art Club exhibition in 1891, which also included the work of George Clausen, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Edgar Degas and Monet, among others.
AGNSW collection Rupert Bunny Boat building, Etaples circa 1902
Rupert Bunny became one of the most successful artists of his generation, exhibiting to great acclaim in Europe and Australia throughout his lifetime. He remains best known as the creator of grand, sumptuous paintings of Parisian life in the late 19th century, but his oeuvre reflects his rich milieu and the rapidly changing styles of the belle époque.
Étaples, or Étaples-sur-Mer, in northern France was particularly popular with artists and its art colony attracted a number of painters to the area at the turn of the 20th century. Bunny visited Étaples many times, including in 1902 while on his honeymoon, painting works that reflected the wet, grey and stormy weather of the time.
AGNSW collection Adrian Feint The striped petunia 1939
His was an exquisite art that mirrored the tranquillity of his life and the refinement his tastes... - Douglas Dundas, 1971.
Adrian Feint was a student at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner; his painting practice extending from his work as a modern designer. His still lifes have been noted for their surreal quality.
AGNSW collection JH Carse Creek scene, Tilba Tilba 1875
Arriving in Australia during Victoria's gold rush JH Carse quickly established himself as a painter of landscapes, travelling widely in Victoria and NSW.
This painting has the refinement of detail and subtlety of colouration for which his finest works are known. It reveals an intimate knowledge of the Australian landscape and a melancholy romanticism which was keenly felt.
AGNSW collection Dorrit Black Elizabeth Street, Sydney 1939
Dorrit Black was a key figure in the development of modernist aesthetics in Australia during the interwar decades, largely due to her work as a printmaker.
This view is from Elizabeth Street facing north towards St James Road as it curves towards Queens Square. Several of the structures in this image are visible today, including the spire of St James Church, King Street courts and the heavy foliage of a Moreton Bay fig in Hyde Park. Black reduced these forms to very basic geometric shapes in a compressed picture plane, influenced by the principles of cubism.
AGNSW collection Godfrey Miller (Objects at night) 1948-1951
A visionary who rejected the materialism of his age, Godfrey Miller was deeply cerebral and monk-like in his quest to create work that accorded with his view of the universe as an intensely felt, shimmering kaleidoscope in continual flux.
(Objects at night) is a beautifully realised statement of his complex aesthetic of inherent contradictions. The segmented, crystallised fractures that make up the surface of the work ultimately create a tightly unified whole, with objects sitting separately in space but also collated in their movement.
AGNSW collection Yvonne Audette Italia benvenuto 1957
Sydney-born Yvonne Audette was part of a generation of artists, who came to prominence from the mid 1950s, whose work represents the first significant movement of abstract art in Australia.
Italia benvenuto (‘Welcome Italy’ in Italian) is a significant moment in Audette’s early series of abstractions and indicative of the style that she had finessed by the late 1950s. In her mark-making, we can see her engagement with Japanese calligraphic arts and their associated notion of investigating essential forms.