Painting. More Painting

ACCA, Melbourne, from 29 July – 25 September 2016

Presented in two chapters across ACCA’s four exhibition galleries, Painting. More Painting is a big-picture focus on contemporary Australian painting, featuring the work of over 70 living Australian artists.

Conceived by ACCA Curator Annika Kristensen and Associate Curator Hannah Mathews, and developed in collaboration with ACCA’s new Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany, Painting. More Painting brings together a range of painting practices that reflect the medium’s enduring importance and its recent return to the centre of much public debate.

Painting. More Painting will be the first major institutional exhibition of contemporary Australian painting in over a decade. The work of fourteen influential Australian painters will be presented in a series of solo studies offering in-depth insights into the evolution of these artists’ interests, techniques and approaches. These will be complemented by an extensive panoramic survey presented in ACCA’s main exhibition hall that brings together works by over sixty senior, mid and early-career Australian artists, offering audiences the chance to draw on the many diverse conceptual, polemic and stylistic connections that exist between generations.  

Works in the panoramic section of the exhibition will be displayed upon an ambitious 90 metre-long, mural-scale wall painting by Sam Songailo. Songailo’s mural serves as a spectacular frame, surface, network and mesh for the group exhibition – a dramatic backdrop upon which a range of diverse, and at times incommensurate, painterly positions will be presented.
Painting. More Painting will bring together a broad range of dedicated and rigorous practices that each use painting as a critical or conceptual form, reflecting the ways in which artists remain keen to work with traditional mediums and explore the role of the artist’s hand in the digital age.  It will also explore the specific dialogues that painters share as colleagues, as well as with the artists that came before them.

“Notwithstanding the many (premature) pronouncements of the death or demise of painting over the past century, and further back to the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, painting is firmly on the Australian and international agenda,” said ACCA’s Artistic Director Max Delany.  

“Its rise is reflected in a growing number of international museum exhibitions, publications and symposia related to the medium, and the growing numbers of painting students in art schools.  This exhibition will examine the ways artists continue to reinvent painting, and how they respond to new perceptual conditions brought about by the advent of the digital and virtual realms.”

Solo presentations will include works by Abdul Abdullah, Ry David Bradley, Angela Brennan, Vivienne Binns, Stephen Bram, Mitch Cairns, Matthys Gerber, Diena Georgetti, Helen Johnson, David Jolly, Lisa Radford, Teresa Baker, Karl Wiebke and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.

Painting. More Painting.  Curated by Max Delany, Annika Kristensen and Hannah Mathews
Chapter 1: 29 July – 28 August 2016
Chapter 2:  1 – 25 September 2016

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
111 Sturt St, Southbank VIC 3006, Australia.
10am – 5pm Tuesday to Friday;
12-5pm weekends and public holidays
Monday by appointment.
Tel: 03 9697 9999.  Admission: Free
www.accaonline.org.au

ACCA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

For further media information:  
Katrina Hall 0421153046 or kathall@ozemail.com.au