Man Rayand Max Dupain

This exhibition brings into dialogue for the first time the contemporaneous work of American-born artist Man Ray and eminent Australian photographer Max Dupain, with a focus on their experimentation with surrealist imagery and innovative photographic techniques.

One of the most original and avant-garde artists of his generation, Man Ray (1890–1976) spent his productive working life in Paris, where he was a key contributor to the dadaist and surrealist movements. While he utilised a range of mediums across his career, he is most famous for his innovations in photography, including solarisation—which he reinvented for modern purposes with Lee Miller—and the development of his ‘rayographs’. A conflation of his own name and chosen medium, these photograms or camera-less photographs allowed Man Ray to harness chance and blur the boundary between abstraction and realism.

Max Dupain (1911–1992) had a long and celebrated career as a photographer based in Sydney, where he opened his first commercial studio in 1934. While he had been aware of developments in photography internationally in the early 1930s, it wasn’t until he received a copy of the book Photographs by Man Ray 1920–1934, that he was fully introduced to Surrealism—the effect of which changed the trajectory of his practice. Dupain’s review of Man Ray’s book appeared in The Home magazine that year, and he immediately and decisively moved away from Pictorialism and started trialing the latest techniques. He began to frame and crop his images in inventive ways and experiment with solarisation and photomontage, processes that would become a feature of both his creative and commercial output for the ensuing years.

Featuring more than 200 prints spanning a range of subject matter, from the nude, still life and portraits to fashion and advertising, the exhibition also considers the artists’ respective collaborations with their creative and romantic partners, Lee Miller and Olive Cotton.