Art

Heide occupies a unique position in the development of modern and contemporary Australian art and in the overall art and cultural history of Australia. Heide boasts a national reputation for artistic excellence and scholarship, and has presented more than 260 solo, group or thematic exhibitions of modern and contemporary art since 1981. The changing program of exhibitions draws works from individual artists, private and public collections, as well as from the Heide Collection.

The core of the Heide Collection was assembled over five decades by Heide founders John and Sunday Reed. It  has since expanded through many individual gifts as well as four significant donations—the Museum of Modern Art and Design Collection, the Baillieu Myer Collection of the ?80s, the Barrett Reid Collection, which included works Reid originally received from John and Sunday Reed, and most recently, the Albert and Barbara Tucker Gift, donated by Barbara Tucker. Heide continues to add to its collection with work by contemporary Australian artists, with either donated funds or generous gifts. Works from the collection—many of them well-loved paintings, drawings and sculptures by significant Australian modernists (and related archival material) now form the core of all exhibitions in Heide I and Heide II.

The work of the modernist artists of the ‘Heide circle’ has featured in the exhibition programs from the first year of opening, with an exhibition of Ned Kelly Paintings by Sidney Nolan in 1981, followed in subsequent years with solo shows by Sam Atyeo, Joy Hester, Danila Vassilieff, Sweeney Reed and other artists closely associated with Heide. This tradition continues to this day, with the 2011 survey of Albert Tucker’s important series Images of Modern Evil following a sequence of exhibitions that have explored different aspects of his oeuvre.

In keeping with the Reeds’ support of the artists of their time, Heide has always promoted the work of living artists, beginning in 1982 with the exhibition New Art/New Artists. The many subsequent contemporary surveys have included the third, fourth and fifth Australian Sculpture Triennials (1987, 1990, 1993), Power and Beauty: Indigenous Art Now (2007) and Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing (2010–11). Solo exhibitions by contemporary artists have included Susan Norrie, Tony Clark, Rick Amor, Kathy Temin, Callum Morton and, from 1996, a series of small project exhibitions by emerging practitioners.

The groundbreaking exhibition Cubism & Australian Art (2009–10) is the most recent of scholarly historical surveys that have included Heidelberg to Heide: Creating an Australian Landscape (2001); 1956: Melbourne, Modernity and the XVI Olympiad (1997); and Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2009).

Though the focus is on Australian art, international artists have always been a part of the program at Heide, which has shown Picasso linocuts (1984–5), Henry Moore prints and models (1992), a site-specific installation by Barbara Kruger (1996); and works from the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam in The World in Painting (2008).

Over time, both the gardens and buildings have inspired the program, from landscape paintings and sculptural installations in the gardens, to exhibitions with an architectural focus such as Living in Landscape: Heide and Houses by McGlashan and Everist (2006).