Designed for student preparation and follow-up, these resources provide information on the ideas, themes and influences found in the exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Carolyn Eskdale: Memory Horizon
In Memory Horizon Carolyn Eskdale presents new work that responds to the modernist architecture of Heide Modern—formerly a domestic house commissioned by Heide founders John and Sunday Reed as ‘a gallery to be lived in’—and that activates the house as its own cast object. After spending time ‘inhabiting’ the building and making ephemeral installations in each of its seven rooms, Eskdale has developed a sculptural language of motifs and forms specific to its character and history.
ALBERT TUCKER: MARKING THE PAST
While living in Italy in the 1950s Albert Tucker embarked on a new chapter in his artistic practice. Inspired by early Christian and Renaissance art, he painted biblical narratives about resurrection, rebirth and overcoming adversity. It was a time of self-discovery that led him to explore the Australian landscape from a new perspective, relating the fissures of the outback to the idea of physical and emotional scars.
Shannon Lyons: Dark Kitchen
Shannon Lyons is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores the complex relationships that exist between art and its context. Her works take the form of installations, sculptures, gestures and interventions that critically examine the sites where they are made or exhibited.
Terminus: Jess Johnson and Simon Ward
Inspired by Sci-Fi, comics and fantasy movies, Terminus is a virtual reality (VR) installation that transports the viewer into an imaginary landscape of colour and pattern populated by human clones, moving walkways and gateways to new realms.
Learning resources, including a video and artist interview, are available from the National Gallery of Australia website.
An Idea Needing to Be Made: Contemporary Ceramics
An Idea Needing to Be Made is an exhibition centred predominantly around the idea of the vessel form and its continued use and reinvention by contemporary artists working with clay.
Apocalyptic Horse
Apocalyptic Horse is an exhibition exploring psychology, the body and the landscape—and the theatre that ties them together—through the artistic practice of Albert Tucker.
Mirka for Melbourne
Mirka for Melbourne recreates the colourful ambience of the artist’s home and studio, and acknowledges her remarkable contribution to Australia’s cultural life.
Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess
For her installation at Heide, Isadora Vaughan reconsiders the basic properties of materials and their capacity to suggest meaning beyond themselves—poetic, political, organic or otherwise
Mirka Mora: Pas de Deux—Drawings and Dolls
This exhibition brings together some of Mirka Mora's most personal work: drawings and soft-sculpture dolls from her home and studio where she kept them close for many decades.
Design for Life: Grant and Mary Featherston
Design for Life explores the career of Grant Featherston, arguably Australia’s most significant modernist designer, and his partnership with Mary Featherston, who is renowned for her design for children
Diane Arbus: American Portraits
The images of Diane Arbus stand as powerful allegories of post-war America, and once seen are rarely forgotten. A National Gallery of Australia exhibition.
Jenny Watson: The Fabric of Fantasy
Jenny Watson is a leading Australian artist whose conceptual painting practice spans more than four decades. The Fabric of Fantasy features works from the 1970s to the present, including examples of Watson’s early realist paintings and drawings, and a number of key series of works on fabric.
Learning resources are available from the Museum of Contemporary Art website
O'Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism
Making Modernism brings together for the first time the iconic art of Georgia O'Keeffe, one of America's most significant painters of the twentieth century, alongside modernist masterpieces by pioneering Australian artists, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith.
Further learning resources are available from the Art Gallery of NSW website
Michelle Nikou: a e i o u
Adelaide-based artist Michelle Nikou draws on surrealism in a reflective and productive way to transform mundane domestic objects and materials into sculptures of humour, poignancy and marvel.
Sitelines: Natasha Johns Messenger
This exhibition includes new installations, photographs and light-works by Natasha Johns-Messenger, an artist from Melbourne now based in New York, whose art explores the gap between knowledge and perception.
Dancing Umbrellas: An Exhibition of Movement and Light
An exhibition of moving image, performance, painting and object-based works by contemporary Australian artists which together create a spatio-temporal and visually immersive environment.
Aleks Danko: MY FELLOW AUS-TRA-ALIENS
MY FELLOW AUS-TRA-ALIENS presents artworks spanning nearly five decades of the long career of Victorian-based artist Aleks Danko, from his earliest exhibitions in the late 1960s through to his recent installations.
Learning Resources are available from the Museum of Conemporary Art website
Colour Sensation: The Works of Melinda Harper
Colour Sensation: The Works of Melinda Harper surveys the work of one of Australia’s most significant contemporary abstract artists in her first major museum exhibition.
21st Century Heide: The Collection since 2000
21st Century Heide: The Collection Since 2000 celebrates recent acquisitions of contemporary art to Heide Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection
21st Century Heide Learning Materials
Abstraction-Création: J.W Power in Europe 1921-1938
J.W. Power was Australia’s most successful expatriate painter of the interwar years. This exhibition focuses on Power’s career in the context of London and Paris between the wars.
Being Human: The Graphic Works of George Baldessin
This exhibition presents a selection of Baldessin’s prints and drawings from the Heide Collection, ranging from the artist’s first exhibition in Melbourne in 1964 through to the year of his untimely death in 1978, aged thirty-nine.
Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow
In 'Far Rainbow' Floyd looks at themes of utopianism and community, while exploring how some theories of learning and alternative education might be applied to contemporary art, or articulated through the art object.
Collage: The Heide Collection
This exhibition considers collage as both a method and a theoretical device in Australian art from the late 1930s to the present time.
The Sometimes Chaotic World of Mike Brown
An intimate look at the prolific, boundary breaking work of Mike Brown, from his early days with the collaborative artist group the Imitation Realists, to the final years of his life.
Born to Concrete: The Heide Collection
Visual Poetry from the Collections of Heide Museum of Modern Art and the University of Queensland.
Fiona Hall: Big Game Hunting
Big Game Hunting draws attention to the earth and its life forms as macro and microcosmic sites of conflict: battlefields and wastelands decimated by violent forces, the big games of human greed and folly.
Louise Bourgeois: Late Works
Bourgeois was one of the most influential, inventive and provocative artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and her work continues to expand the scope of subject matter and source material for contemporary art practices.
Less is More: Minimal and post Minimal Art in Australia
This exhibition explores the Minimal Art and the re-working of Minimalism by contemporary artists today.
Louis Saxton: Sanctuary
I spy with my Heide eye...Can you find what I am looking at.
Ken Whisson: As If
In a career spanning over sixty years, Ken Whisson has been making thoughtful and uncompromising paintings and drawings which hold a unique place in Australian art.
Callum Morton: In Memoriam
Callum Morton is a well-established Melbourne artist who works with architecture, modernism and the emotional and social impact of built spaces
Colour Bazaar: Nine Contemporary Works
This exhibition brings together nine works by contemporary artists to create a colourful, eclectic and texturally diverse display that resembles the visual richness of a bazaar.
Albert Tucker: Images of Evil
The Images of Modern Evil series offers a probing and powerful insight into the schismatic social and political climate of World War II and its aftermath.
Up Close
Up Close traces the significant legacy of Australian photographer Carol Jerrems (1949–1980) and situates her work alongside that of other photo-based artists; Larry Clark and Nan Goldin from New York and William Yang from Sydney.
Cubism and Australian Art
Cubism and Australian Art considers the impact of the revolutionary and transformative movement of Cubism on Australian art from the early twentieth century to the present day.
Kathy Temin
This exhibition examines the conceptual and material evolution of Kathy Temin's work over the past twenty years.
The art of existence, Les Kossatz
The art of existence is the first exhibition to review Les Kossatz’s contribution to Australian art in a career that spans the1960s to today.
Mordern Times: the untold story of modernism in Australia
Modern times: the untold story of modernism in Australia reveals the transformations in art and life across a period of five decades – 1917 to 1967.
Hinterlands: ALbert Tucker's landscapes 1960 - 1975
Tucker had begun painting Australian landscape themes while living in Italy (1952–56), relying on his memory of the topography and its distinctive forms.
Order and Dissent: works from the Heide Collection
Order and dissent investigates the dialogue and debate generated by originality, diversity and nonconformity in a selection of works from the Heide Collection.
A Single Mind: RIck Amor
This exhibition surveys the work of contemporary Australian artist Rick Amor.
Savage Luxury: Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930-1939
Savage Luxury is the first exhibition to comprehensively review the emergence of early modernist furniture and interior design in Melbourne in the 1930s.
Perfect for Every Occasion: Photography Today
Perfect for every occasion: photography today is one of the first exhibitions to consider what has been developing in Australian photography in the twenty-first century.
