Bundanon exhibition brings 14 of Arthur Boyd's landscapes to Shoalhaven

Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Landscape of the Mid-1980s. Installation view. Bundanon, 2024

Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Landscape of the Mid-80s. Installation view. Bhandanón, 2024

Bundanon

On a patch of blue-and-white sky from one of Arthur Boyd’s large-scale landscapes in Bundanon’s new exhibition, Wilder Times, what appears to be a flock of birds makes its way to Pulpit Rock, the cliff adjacent to Boyd’s assets in Shoalhaven. . River. This is one of 14 works that Boyd made in Bangli/Shoalhaven at other times of the day, depicting the landscape in the soft changing light between midnight and midnight. But if you look closer, the tiny black dots aren’t birds at all. These are 40-year-old insects embedded in oil paint.

In 1984, set designer John Truscott commissioned Boyd to produce a series of landscape paintings for the circular lobby of the State Theatre at the Arts Centre Melbourne. Boyd had six months to deliver them. When they arrived in Melbourne they were wet, with bits of Bundanon insects and blades of grass stuck to the paint. The paintings were framed and hung just in time for the opening in October 1984, where they have remained an iconic feature of the striking, red-walled lobby ever since.

As the State Theater at Melbourne Arts Center undergoes a four-year renovation, the paintings have been returned, for the first time, to the place where they were made.

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“They’ve been noticed anywhere in the lobby of the Melbourne Arts Centre’s State Theatre since they were installed,” curator Sophie O’Brien told Broadsheet. “The return to Bundanon resonates with us in terms of Arthur’s early years here, his way of thinking about landscape, the European landscape culture he was inspired by and how he reacted to the Australian landscape in this context. “

O’Brien chose to position the Arts Centre Melbourne’s collection alongside more than 60 works by Australian figurative artists of the time. Each of the works included were made in the same period, between 1984 and 1986.

“It’s an opportunity to be informed about Boyd’s legacy, but also about this era,” O’Brien says.

The survey includes works borrowed from public and personal primary collections of paintings, films, photographs and print fabrics through Australian artists such as Imants Tillers, Mac Betts, Vivienne Binns, Judy Cassab, Rover Joolama Thomas and many others. The works O’Brien chose reflect the context of the mid-1980s and how landscape functioned through culture.

Vivienne Binns’ painting The Aftermath and the Ikon of Fear, a landscape with ambitious red crosses, shows a baby lying on its back emitting a stream of smoke that extends into the sky, obscuring the land and sky.

“There was a lot of critical thinking. It was a very dynamic moment. To make an undeniable landscape commission is at first a very gentle, undeniable and sublime [task]. But at the same time, Arthur was also creating a safe environment for wildlife. and issue environmental coverage orders for the river. He envisioned Bundanon as a multi-art residency area in an exclusive herbaceous setting. So the landscape has a greater weight,” says O’Brien.

Imants Tillers’ pataphysical man, presented at the 1984 exhibition An Australian Accent at MoMA PS1 in New York, is one of the highlights of the research. In 1981, Tillers began painting on small-scale canvases that he connected to make large-scale portraits. He numbered his portraits from one to infinity and considers them an ever-expanding collection called The Book of Power.

Tillers, who is preparing primary research in Germany next year, tells Broadsheet that he is still counting. “I’m passing by there,” he said. “I’m at number 116,000. “

Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape will be released on October 13, 2024. Admission is $18. Weekend access also includes access to the farm site.

bundanon. com. au/wilder-times

Bundanon exhibition brings 14 of Arthur Boyd’s landscapes to Shoalhaven

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