Both landmark and controversial, The Field, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, showcased Australian artists working in a hard-edged abstract geometric style. Marking a shift away from figurative and landscape painting with local ‘Australian’ characteristics, The Field reflected international formalist trends. To mark the 50th anniversary, the NGV has restaged the exhibition as faithfully as it can in The Field Revisited (for further information see our feature Revisiting the Field). To coincide, a number of local Melbourne galleries have programmed complimentary shows. Most explore the influence of The Field on contemporary art practice, especially abstract art made today, often infused with colour that pops. Others are solo, collaborative and group presentations by artists who were originally in The Field, while one exhibition functions as institutional critique, questioning the restaging an exhibition in which only three of the 40 artists are woman. Below is a guide to these satellite exhibitions.
Abstraction TwentyEighteen
Running across a private house museum, a university gallery, a project space, and two commercial galleries, Abstraction TwentyEighteen is an umbrella for multiple exhibitions highlighting the influence of The Field on 125 artists from around Australia, with the inclusion of some historic works.
The developer of Abstraction TwentyEighteen, artist Stephen Wickham, says, “Our show is a reflection, a celebration of The Field, and it also looks at what’s happening in non-objective and abstract painting today.” The exhibitions include artists who have practiced for decades, and those fresh out of art school, and encompass a range of approaches. “The show that I’ve put together with the other folk reflects back, but more through the lens of where we are in the contemporary world,” says Wickham.
Colour Fields, also part of Abstraction TwentyEighteen, features artworks from the Deakin University collection by key artists included in the original exhibition, complemented with works by contemporary artists. Langford 120 are presenting a group exhibition and solo show by Wayne Conduit, and Five Walls is presenting an exhibition of 34 artists curated by Aaron Martin, PJ Hickman, and Patricia Todarello.
Stephen McLaughlan Gallery
25 April – 26 May
Justin House Museum
28 February – 30 May
Deakin University
9 April – 16 May
Langford120
21 April – 20 May
Five Walls
25 April -12 May
Abstraction 17: A Field of Interest, c. 1968
Abstraction 17: A Field of Interest, c. 1968 includes works from the period of The Field but takes a broader approach, including artists that were overseas at the time, who were overlooked, or not on the radar. This includes Margaret Worth, who shared a studio with Sydney Ball (who was in The Field) and retouched vintage works from 1968 by Janet Dawson and Nigel Lendon.
Charles Nodrum Gallery
26 April – 19 May
Alun Leach-Jones: The Country Beyond the Stars
Alun Leach-Jones, who participated in The Field exhibition, passed away last year. While still working with hard-edged forms and strong colours, this series of paintings, the last made by the artist, show a medley of shapes in an exuberant visual dance.
Nicholas Thompson Gallery
2 May – 20 May
Dick Watkins: Iconic Paintings
Clement Greenberg, the American critic who helped shape Modernism, visited Melbourne in the 1960s and he dished out praise for Dick Watkins. This show of Watkins’s recent paintings displays his move to loose abstract-expressionist anarchic forms.
Scott Livesey Galleries
19 April – 12 May
Finding the Field is an exhibition by Natalie Thomas in conjunction with the Women’s Art Register. Thomas, of the blog Natty Solo, questions why an institution is restaging an exhibition in which only 3 of the 40 artists are women. The show also speaks to the importance of the Women’s Art Register which is approaching its own 50th birthday. Thomas has produced ‘protest posters,’ often satirical gestures, exhibited alongside slides from the Women’s Art Register’s archives.
True Estate Gallery, The Alderman
11 April – 6 May
Monochrome: Empty & Full and David Batchelor: Colour is
Two exhibitions at Margaret Lawrence Gallery explore the power of colour in contemporary abstract art. Monochrome: Empty & Full reflects on the monochrome, its continuing relevance and its dual, sometimes competing origins: the quest for a mystical experience and emphasis on the materiality of the object.
In a solo show, UK based artist and writer David Batchelor explores the immersive qualities of colour, light and text.
Margaret Lawrence Gallery
4 May – 2 June
Nigel Lendon, who exhibited in The Field, is collaborating with an early career artist Lucina Lane at Neon Parc City. Titled Teach the kids to strike, together they will show solo and collaborative works that examine the relationship between art making and collective political movements in the past and present.
Neon Parc City
18 May – 16 June
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
rhythm wRites, a new exhibition at QUT Art Museum, spans 30 years of Bigambul artist Leah King-Smith’s manifold art practice, covering painting, photography, sound and animation.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
