Fresh: your collection
Friday 27 September 2019 to Sunday 21 June 2020
The Withey Gallery
Fresh: your collection showcases additions to the Tweed Regional Gallery collection from the past three years, featuring a diverse selection of artists’ prints, photography, painting and sculpture, many of which are on display in the Gallery for the first time.
The exhibition celebrates the continued growth of the Gallery’s collection. It recognises the generosity of donors, including artists, collectors and philanthropists. The assistance of the Gallery’s support organisations, the Friends and the Foundation, has also been critical to the growth of the collection to more than 1,000 artworks.
The exhibition features works by Australian artists, including Ben Quilty, Cressida Campbell, Guy Maestri, John Honeywill, Karla Dickens, Max Dupain, and William Robinson.
Guy Maestri
Wollumbin 2016, oil on linen
Gift of the Friends of Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, 2018
© The artist
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Margaret Olley: Inspired
Friday 29 November 2019 to Sunday 19 July 2020
Margaret Olley Art Centre
Margaret Olley was inspired by her extraordinary home studio for nearly fifty years. It was an ecosystem of art and life. She painted its interiors in changing light, as well as still life subjects selected from the collections of ‘things’ that filled each and every room.
During her lifetime, Olley and her home studio also inspired other artists - they painted and photographed her portrait, as well as her home studio.
This remarkable space, in the form of the re-creation at the Margaret Olley Art Centre, continues to inspire artists who undertake residencies in the Gallery’s Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio.
This exhibition, drawn entirely from the Tweed Regional Gallery collection, includes interior and still life paintings by Olley, portraits of the artist and responses to her home studio by contemporary artists.
Margaret Olley (1923–2011)
Wildflowers and pears (detail) c.1973
oil on board, 65 x 76cm
Purchased through the bequest of Phoebe McNamara and the Tweed Regional Gallery Donations Fund, 2019
Tweed Regional Gallery collection
© Margaret Olley Art Trust
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Hiromi Tango - Healing Circle - Home
Friday 6 December 2019 to Sunday 15 March 2020
The Friends Gallery
Hiromi Tango is a Japanese-Australian artist dedicated to generating healing conversations through arts engagement. This exhibition of recent work includes Hiromi's meditative circle drawings, neon light sculptures and photographic works that document her performative practice. The recurring motif of the circle is employed as a universal symbol of healing, representing the cycle of life, regeneration, relationships and a total state of completion.
The Gallery is thrilled to be bringing these works home to the Tweed community as Hiromi Tango is one of our most successful regional artists, exhibiting nationally and internationally.
Hiromi Tango is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
Hiromi Tango
Bleached Genes (Mikan)
Open my vulnerability (detail), 2018
pigment print on paper and mirrored Perspex 174.5 x 124.5cm
ed of 3 +2 AP
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Fibro Façade - Catherine O’Donnell
Friday 31 January 2020 to Sunday 28 June 2020
The Anthony Gallery
My art practice focuses on the urban landscape by representing the commonly overlooked dwellings of suburbia in an abstracted form. A current interest is fibro houses, which can be found all over Australia, but more locally for me in Western Sydney, where I grew up. This type of housing was used for housing estates in parts of the country; an exercise in idealistic social engineering that has now become a cultural signifier of lower socio-economic communities. In other areas of Australia, these humble structures were used as low-cost housing solutions in towns and on properties; some have come to represent the holidays, escapes from the routine of daily life.
Through my drawings, I aim to highlight the building’s function as a home, as well as its modernist form, in order to reveal it as simultaneously altruistic, beautiful, impractical and a refuge. In these structures, it is the uncomplicated geometric construction and simplicity of form that captures my imagination. I draw what I regard to be beautiful or interesting in order to highlight the power of the ordinary, commonplace architecture of the urban landscape. At first glance, these qualities may not be evident, as these developments are not always given the same value as other housing. But to me, these buildings are so much more that the physical embodiment of post-war utopian ideals and principles of European modernism. They have been, and still are, homes for many people.
Fibro Façade is a touring exhibition from MAY SPACE, Sydney.
Catherine O’Donnell
Urban perspective – large window 2017/18
charcoal on paper, 98.5 × 135.2cm
Image courtesy the artist and MAY SPACE, Sydney
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JamFactory ICON Clare Belfrage: A Measure of Time
Friday 21 February 2020 to Sunday 3 May 2020
The Temporary Exhibitions Gallery
With a career spanning almost three decades, leading South Australian glass blower Clare Belfrage has forged an international reputation for her finely detailed glass sculptures that marry organic blown forms with intricate line work.
Throughout her career, Belfrage has maintained a vibrant studio glass practice and is known for her distinctive artworks in which complex patterns of fine glass lines trace her forms. Inspired by the repetitious patterns found in nature and the woven lines of textiles, Belfrage is particularly drawn to the layered rhythms that mark growth, change and the passing of time in the natural world.
This solo exhibition showcases Belfrage’s innovation of the ‘stringer’ technique in which she painstakingly applies stretched glass rods known as ‘stringers’ to her glass. The resulting surface has an almost textile-like quality akin to those produced by knitting and weaving
JamFactory ICON Clare Belfrage: A Measure of Time is a JamFactory touring exhibition.
JamFactory ICON Clare Belfrage: A Measure of Time has been assisted by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, Contemporary Touring Initiative.
Clare Belfrage
A Measure of Time, collection of works, 2018
tallest height 530mm
Photo: Pippy Mount
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Captive Companions - Anne Smerdon and Corinne Lewis
Friday 21 February 2020 to Sunday 3 May 2020
The Boyd Gallery
For decades, the intelligence of birds has been greatly underestimated and they have been thought of as ‘easy pets’. However, recent ornithological studies have shed light on just how intelligent birds actually are. Some species of birds even rival humans in certain aspects of intelligence and social skills. These findings challenge the way we as humans have been keeping pet birds in captivity and it provides insight into how we can become more supportive and ethical bird owners.
In an attempt to highlight this, artists and friends Corinne Lewis and Anne Smerdon, brought together over 30 highly trained free-flight birds of different species, to document their personalities and plumage.
For Anne, taking references from live birds that are free to fly and express themselves offers the rare opportunity to closely encounter and document the true personalities of each bird.
For Corinne, the focus rests on the intimate bond between highly trained ‘birds’ and their ‘dedicated humans’. Eschewing traditional portraiture, the females in Corinne’s paintings are anonymous.
Sumptuous garments emulate the vivid plumage of the birds they hold. The exotic bird denotes the feminine, the intuitive and the multi-hued resonance that is nature itself.
An outcome of the Community Access Exhibitions Program.
Anne Smerdon
Raikou (juvenile Blue-throated conure, Pyrrhura cruentata) 2019
oil on board, 30 × 20cm
Image courtesy the artist
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Floral Appreciation - Judy Oakenfull
Friday 21 February 2020 to Sunday 3 May 2020
Macnaughton Focus Gallery and Kelly Wall
One of the best things about visiting the beach is the fabulous welcome you get from coastal banksias. I love their furry yellow flowers, silvery olive leaves and misshapen cones. I started painting these, and then other varieties, drawn to their earthy colours, geometric shapes, internal patterns and charismatic forms. Inspired by modernist and contemporary approaches to painting my work tends towards flatter compositions, imagined colour, solid forms and a combination of the representational and the abstract.
Flowers have often been thought of as symbols of the feminine and I have been considering what the increasing popularity of native flowers suggests about contemporary femininity. Margaret Preston painted them in the 1920s and ‘30s, when women were establishing a new found assertiveness. Not dainty and fragile like traditional flowers, banksias work equally well as a signifier for femininity in the current age of #metoo. They appear to have the toughness and resilience required of current times and changing climates.
An outcome of the Community Access Exhibitions Program.
Judy Oakenfull, 2019
An outcome of the Community Access Exhibitions Program
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