Friday, 10 March 2006 | Elif Sungur
Fortuna
Lively Japanese prints dating from the 1920s and '30s are showing in the University Art Gallery as part of an exhibition that features recent gifts to the University Art Collection.
Couples dancing western style and Kobe street scenes that contrast the traditional and the modern are the subject of the four colourful woodcuts by Kawanishi Hide. Bought last year with funds from the Morrissey Bequest, they complement four others by Kawanishi that are part of the University Collection.
Along with many of the works in the University's Japanese print collection, now numbering well over 200, Kawanishi's help document the sosaku-hanga creative print movement of 1910-1950 which concentrated on the originality of the individual artist, University Collection Curator Sioux Garside said.
But diversity is a theme of the current exhibition which includes young Melbourne artist Kylie Stillman's imaginative carving of a tree into a stack of old Encyclopaedia Britannicas, along with an ancient painted pottery vessel from the Chinese Neolithic period.
Two of Australia's most prominent contemporary artists known for their abstraction, Marion Borgelt and Aida Tomescu, are represented by works they've donated to the Collection. Tomescu's painting and drawings are strongly expressionistic while Borgelt's painting of an abstracted concentric coil meditatively gives the illusion of subtle three dimensional movement characteristic of her work.
It stands in contrast to a powerful composition of swirling thick black lines by Tony Tuckson, one of Australia's most important abstract painters of the preceding generation.
Suzanne Archer's etchings of students calmly carrying out dissection of horses in the University's Veterinary Science laboratory hang adjacent to a mellow 1950 portrait by Nora Heysen and a building-scape by realist painter Jane Bennett.
Shay Docking's semi-abstract interpretation of the Glass House Mountains from 1963 hangs opposite an imposing black and white woodcut by contemporary Chinese artist Su Xinping featuring his self portrait looming large from a scene of Chinese mountains.
Another Chinese work on show is a colour lithograph by contemporary Chinese printmaker Li Fan - a humorous depiction of life in the rapidly changing Beijing.
Two large, recent bark paintings by Aboriginal artists John Mawurndjul and Djambawa Marawili are included in the exhibition, on long-term loan to the University Collection.
The ongoing generosity of donors and sponsors enabled the University to develop the collection and show a wide range of artworks, Ms Garside said, and it was this good fortune of the University's which was being celebrated in the current exhibition.
Fortuna: new gifts and loans to the art collection officially opened on 22 February when Christopher Hodges - long-time director of Utopia Art Sydney and acknowledged expert in the fields of contemporary and indigenous art - spoke on "Art, collecting and benefaction".
The exhibition can be viewed from 12noon to 4pm, Tuesday to Thursday, at the University Art Gallery in the War Memorial Arch of the Quadrangle, off Science Road until 13 April 2006.
For further information, please visit http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/93.html?eventc...d=6&eventid=506
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