MEDIA RELEASE
13 April 2017
Gold Coast City Gallery exhibition celebrates one of regional
Australia’s most significant collections of abstract art
Gold Coast City Gallery is launching a new exhibition Hard and Fast: Abstraction, Pop, Colour Field on
Saturday 15 April, featuring some of Australia’s most recognised artists working in abstract art. The
international movement launched in the late 1950s and is known for its hard edges and lines in fast
changing times of society and culture.
Gold Coast City Gallery is privileged to hold one of the most significant collections of Australian abstract
art in regional Australia. Much of the work has been hidden away in storage for many years and the
Gallery is excited to celebrate this aspect of the collection, along with prominent examples of pop and
colour field in Australian art.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, international exhibitions from London and New York travelled to
Sydney and Melbourne showcasing abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop and colour field painting
and exposed Australian artists and audiences to new forms of contemporary art.
The year 1968 was a milestone for radical new directions in contemporary art in Australia. In that year
renowned American art critic Clement Greenberg visited Australia championing abstraction, and The
Field, one of the most influential art exhibitions ever held in Australia, showcased contemporary
abstract art for the official opening of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). In the same year Eric
Westbrook, then Director of the NGV, was guest judge for the inaugural Gold Coast Art Prize.
Westbrook’s interest and influence in the movement were pivotal in the establishment of the Gold
Coast’s impressive abstract art collection.
The Field boldly launched the careers of many prominent Australian artists, who are represented in the
Gold Coast City Gallery collection and feature in the Hard and Fast exhibition, including David Aspden,
Sydney Ball, Janet Dawson, Michael Johnson, Col Jordan and Ron Robertson-Swann.
‘The exhibition provides an opportunity to get the ‘Director’s Choice’ of some of the most exciting early
works in the Gallery’s collection,’ said Gold Coast City Gallery Director Tracy Cooper-Lavery. ‘The
abstraction and colour field works in the Gold Coast collection are so numerous that the current
exhibition could be displayed three times over,’ she said.
‘Gold Coast City Gallery has a rich and varied collection of Australian art that begins predominantly in
the late 1960s; at a time when the Gold Coast was beginning to position itself as a contemporary,
modern tourist destination. The works in this exhibition explore the new developments in international
art embraced by young Australian artists at the time when often the ‘old’ was shunned to make way for
‘the shock of the new’,’Cooper-Lavery said.
The exhibition also includes a small number of contemporary responses to abstraction and pop by the
next generation of Australian artists; demonstrating abstraction remains a compelling force in
contemporary art practice.
Hard and Fast: Abstraction, Pop, Colour Field is on display in the Main Gallery from 15 April until 21
May 2017. Full exhibition and public program details are available at
www.theartscentregc.com.au/gallery
Exhibiting Artists: David Aspden, Col Jordan, Michael Johnson, Richard Larter, Jon Molvig, Fred
Cress, Janet Dawson, Robert Morris, Allan Mitelman, John Coburn, Sandra Leveson, David Rankin,
John Firth-Smith, Stephen Earle, Sydney Ball, Rosalie Gascoigne, Howard Arkley, Gordon Bennett,
Imants Tillers, Martin Sharp, Peter Moller, Ildiko Kovacs, Ron Robertson-Swann and Robert Klippel.
For all media & image enquiries please contact:
Jen Gyles | Marketing Coordinator, Gallery (Tues,Wed,Thurs)
T (07) 5588 4001
E [email protected]
Tracy Cooper-Lavery | Director, Gold Coast City Gallery
T (07) 5588 4058
E [email protected]
Hard and Fast - Images
Drop Box Link -HERE
Conditions for use of images
 All images must be acknowledged as specified. Captions and acknowledgements are mandatory.
 All images remain in copyright.
Image
Caption
Martin Sharp, Kaspar, 1982
Screenprint, Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 1999
John Coburn, For Vivaldi, 1971, synthetic polymer
paint on canvas, Purchased Gold Coast Art Prize
1975
Stephen Earle, Ra Ra Rinktum, 1969, synthetic
polymer paint on canvas, Purchased Gold Coast Art
Prize 1970
The Arts Centre Gold Coast
135 Bundall Road, Surfers Paradise QLD
P: 07 5588 6567
E: [email protected]
W: www.theartscentregc.com.au