Art Guide

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March/April 2010

A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that showcase Asian art, Read More

Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More

The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More

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The Samstag Museum of Art

By Stephanie radok

Erica Green was first appointed director of the University of South Australia Art Museum in 1990 (previous directors include Stephanie Britton and Tim Morrell). Green oversaw the gallery's move from the suburb of Underdale to the city of Adelaide in 1998 and since 2000 she has overlooked the design and construction of the new gallery, now called the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art.

The new gallery designed by John Wardle Architects + Hassell Architects in Association is the second largest public gallery in South Australia. It will open on the 11th of October and has three exhibition spaces - a 500 square metre gallery, a mezzanine gallery and a smaller project space. All the floors are beautiful polished ironbark and do not connect with the walls but stop about 10 centimetres short of them, and possess concealed data ports around their edges.

Timothy Horn, Discomedusae, 2004, synair, polyurethane rubber and light globes. Samstag Collection. University of South Australia

This lack of connect between floor and walls gives the galleries a sense of floating in air which can be interpreted as a mental space of receptivity, a good place to be when looking at art.

The Museum is the permanent home of two spectacular and large artworks, one is the specially commissioned public sculpture called Different forms of Intelligence by Fiona Hall and the other is Discomedusae by Samstag scholar Timothy Horn (above).

Hall's work, which has been made over the last eighteen months, was conceived as an integral part of the entire design of the building. It uses the brain as a symbol of intelligence and the five Platonic solids, the cube, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, as metaphors for different types of intelligence.

Hall has intensively fabricated brain textures on three forms in clay to be cast in bronze and finished with three different patinas by mastercraftsman Paul Westra, while sculptor Tony Bishop has carved brain textures into both a wooden and a marble form.

The complete work also includes an anatomically correct brain made from glass by Hall with some assistance from glass artist Deb Jones.

He says being in a rural area without a university it is hard to attract people aged in their 20s: "When people hit about 18 they tend to go to the city and we don't see them again until they're in their mid-30s and they come back with families."

Narelle Autio, Siren VI from the series The Place in Between, 2007, from the series The Place in Between, pigment print, 85cm x 104cm. Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

The work promises to provoke both thought and wonder. Timothy Horn's extraordinary giant jellyfish chandelier inspired by the illustrations of the nineteenth century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel will hang in the entry area.

Wonderful World, the inaugural Museum exhibition, running from 11 October to 7 December, will span all three gallery spaces, and is curated by Erica Green. It features the work of Narelle Autio, Simon Carroll/Martin Friedel, Jon Cattapan, Daniel Crooks, James Darling/ Lesley Forwood, Robert MacPherson, Ningura Napurrula, Susan Norrie, Philip Wolfhagen and Anne Zahalka with a catalogue essay by David Hansen.

Many of the works in the exhibition are large, including installations by Susan Norrie and Simon Carroll. Jon Cattapan and Philip Wolfhagen have undertaken major new works for this exhibition, Wolfhagen's work is over 9 metres.

For the 2008 Adelaide Festival the gallery will show Penumbra: contemporary art from Taiwan, from 29 February to 4 April, curated by Sophie McIntyre featuring a range of new media and installation works by established and emerging contemporary artists in Taiwan.

Later in 2008, an exhibition of art by South Australian artists called Uneasy curated by Tim Morrell will be shown.

Simon Carroll, & Martin Friedel, born 1945 Wartaweil, West Germany. History of a day, 2004, 35mm film/ DVD, 4 screens, stereo sound, 20:00mins. Courtesy the artists and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image

While the gallery has been closed Green has energetically deaccessioned works and the Museum collection will now focus exclusively on South Australian artists and Samstag scholarship winners.

The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art is an important link in the chain of university art museums spanning Australia.

These Museums are vital in the development and consolidation of Australian culture by supporting the achievements of artists and in curating and circulating exhibitions of both Australian and international art.

Though Australian art is international as well as being Australian, isn't it?

The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia 55 North Terrace, Adelaide opens 11 October 2007

Stephanie radok is an artist, writer, and editor based in Adelaide.

Jon Cattapan, (b.1956 Melbourne, Australia), Possible histories: stream 2007, oil on linen, 165 x 645 cm (4 panels). Courtesy: Sutton Gallery, Melbourne