2000

China, China – A series of works in porcelain by Ah Xian

RMIT Gallery

6 - 28 October 2000

China, China is an exhibition of more than 35 exquisite hand-made and painted porcelain busts made in a studio-workshop in China by Ah Xian, an artist regarded as one of Australia’s most important Post-Tiananmen Square émigré artists.

Ah Xian’s China, China series prompts questions about cultural identity and authenticity, perfection, beauty, and mortality. This work has been celebrated for being both visually seductive and historically poignant.

China, China is the result of a decade long philosophical journey. As Ah Xian has observed: “Once I decided to leave China, the country of my birth where I grew up and was educated and which I both deeply loved and hated at the same time, my soul began a journey to pursue and explore something called freedom”.  The production of these conceptual sculptures seem to have gone some way towards salving Ah Xian’s sense of physical and cultural displacement.

Supported by the Australian Council for the Arts.

Wolfgang Sievers: A Life

RMIT Gallery

25 August - 23 September 2000

Wolfgang Sievers: A Life charts and celebrates the odyssey-like life and art of one of Australia’s most significant and influential photographers.

Wolfgang Sievers: A Life is a reflective, autobiographical exhibition comprising one hundred photographs made over a career spanning more than fifty years. The exhibition traces Sievers’ life shaped by war and emigration and marked by a lasting social and political consciousness demonstrated by a number of individual -powerfully symbolic gestures. Wolfgang Sievers is best known for his photographs showing man in industry and for his passion for notions of integrity and quality.

A remarkable stylistic consistency characterises Sievers work ­- his photographs are often bold compositions rendered in sharp focus with a strong graphic quality and a highly charged dramatic use of depth of field. A grand sense of scale characterises much of his industrial photography – the viewer is encouraged to respond to vast spaces rendered even larger by wide views.

The exhibition has been created by Sievers around a series of themes and bodies of work including; his family, his early photographs in Germany and Portugal, Industry, Architecture and Indigenous Australia. The exhibition also features a series works made in 1977 on the topic of Colombian prehistory, ruins and archaeology. In this series, some forty years after his aborted studies in Berlin, he returned to his early interest in archaeology.

Supported by the Goethe Institut, Melbourne and RMIT Gallery

Frederick Romberg and the Architecture of Migration

RMIT Gallery

24 August - 23 September 2000

The exhibition on the Melbourne architect Frederick Romberg (1913-1992) raises polemical questions about migration and modernism in Australian architecture.

The exhibition thesis is articulated through the photographs of Wolfgang Sievers, Mark Strizic and Max Dupain, highlighting the significance of architectural photography in the public understanding of modern architecture. The project is a photographic exhibition of the work of the German-born, Swiss-trained Melbourne architect Frederick Romberg.

The exhibition examines the career of an architect whose work has been overlooked in the history of Australian architecture, although he was for almost a decade the third partner in the country’s most influential architectural practice of the 50s and early 60s, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd.

The exhibition examines the architecture of migration, and address certain assumptions concerning the development of modernism in Australia through a direct visual comparison of Romberg’s work with a selection of local and international sources.

Romberg was ahead of his time in commissioning leading architectural photographers to document his work in detail. Thus the exhibition will contain many hitherto unknown works by Sievers, Strizic and Dupain. This illustrates the dynamic relationship between the architecture of modernism and photography, which arose from the Bauhaus, in Germany in the 1920s.

The exhibition consists of 17 mural photographs,  1x2m of Romberg’s work accompanied by a cluster of smaller comparative images which position the larger prints in context. These comparative pieces include examples of European, American and local influences on Romberg’s work, the design themes explored in Romberg’s work and detail. It is in these comparisons and accompanying text that the polemic is developed.

Curators: Harriet Edquist and Helen Stuckey

The Patient Planet A World History in 255 photographs: 1941— '95

RMIT Gallery

24 July - 13 August 2000

The Patient Planet surveys fifty years of international documentary photography and photojournalism as published in the Swiss magazine du.

The exhibition includes more than 250 photographs by 108 photographers from Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Britain and the former state of Czechslovakia ,the United States, Central and South America, Japan, Cuba, Morocco and Lebanon.

Some of the best known photographers represented include: Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Brassai, Herbert List, Bill Brandt, Edward Steichen, Constantin Brancusi (better known as a sculptor) and members of the Magnum photo agency in Paris such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

The Patient Planet explores a number of the most tumultuous moments and themes of World history over the past fifty years. Some of the major themes in the exhibition include: The Aftermath of World War II in Europe, The Cold War, China and Tibet, The United States from the 1950s to the 1970s, Work and Faces – featuring images of some of the world’s best known characters ;Eva Perron, Jean-Paul Satre, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.  Creative Moments features posed portraits of artists; including Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis, Henri Matisse and Robert Rauschenberg and dynamic images of artists at work including Jackson Pollock and film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni.

RMIT Gallery also displays a selection of Australian photographs from Monash Gallery of Art ‘s permanent collection. This includes forty images by fourteen significant Australian photographers – Wolfgang Seivers, David Moore, Mark Strizic, Axel Poignant and Leah King-Smith.

Curator: Suzanne Davies

Marlene Dietrich (b. 1901, d. 1992): A Legend in Photographs

RMIT Gallery

5 June - 15 July 2000

An exhibition of 40 photographs and excerpts from Marlene Dietrich films.

Marlene Dietrich — a work of art, made up of light and pose, of diamante and voice— is an immortal of the film, the stage and the art of erotic refinement and critical to our understanding of German political and cultural history.

Exhibition compiled by: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Presented by RMIT Gallery in association with the Goethe Institut, Melbourne, in co-operation with the Cinematheque and the AFI.

Bringing the House Down 12 Months of Australian Political Cartoons

RMIT Gallery

3 - 22 April 2000

The National Museum recognises that cartooning is an important part of Australia’s political culture. Cartoons are an invaluable resource for exploring Australian history, each providing a snapshot of ideas and beliefs surrounding major public events. Approximately half of the works in this year’s exhibition have been donated to the National Museum.  These help build a wonderful archive of Australian history as seen through the eyes of some of our best cartoonists.

The National Museum recognises that cartooning is an important part of Australia’s political culture.  Cartoons are an invaluable resource for exploring Australian history, each providing a snapshot of ideas and beliefs surrounding major public events. Bringing the House Down is a celebration of the best of Australian political cartooning.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to view the original works of Australia’s leading cartoonists including Bill Leak, Alan Moir, Peter Nicholson, Cathy Wilcox, Ron Tandberg, Mark Knight, Sean Leahy, Bruce Petty, Dean Alston, Jenny Coopes and Ward O’Neill.  Illustrators represented include John Spooner, Michael Fitzjames, Brett Lethbridge and Joanne Applegate.  The exhibition also provides an opportunity to look again at the major political events in Australia over the last twelve months.

Curator: Guy Hansen

unpublished Australian and New Zealand Fashion Photography

RMIT Gallery

7 February - 18 March 2000

unpublished is an exhibition of specially commissioned images: photographs and videos that freely explore the possibilities of contemporary Australian and New Zealand fashion photography.

unpublished is the first major exhibition of this internationally recognised avant garde of contemporary fashion photographers.

Curated by Melbourne Art Designer Fabio Ongarato, unpublished is a diverse and representative showcase of new innovative and experimental fashion photography, ranging across media and formats from magazine to billboard size images, intricate assemblages and video.

The twelve photographers included in unpublished are Peter Bainbridge, Jonathan Bookallil, Sam Borich, Rachael Cassells, Troy Coburn, Max Doyle, Derek Henderson, Simon Lekias, David Mandleberg, Peter Rad, Tim Richardson, Justin Smith and Stephen Ward.

Curator: Fabio Ongarato

A Key Woolmark 2000 Melbourne Fashion Festival exhibition. Sponsored by RMIT University and Calvin Klein underwear.