Arthur Boyd’s works to be taken on national tour

Curated by Barry Pearce and drawn principally from Bundanon Trust’s own collection of the artist’s work, Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul will premiere at the National Art School Gallery, Sydney from January 10m until March 9, 2019 before touring regional institutions across Australia until 2021.

The exhibition will feature up to 60 paintings, including a group of masterpieces borrowed from major state art museums, as well as 20 works on paper, letters, photographs and sketchbooks spanning almost half a century and featuring works from his adolescence through to his final years.

Bundanon Trust CEO, Deborah Ely said the exhibition explores the trajectory of one of the nation’s most important artists.

“It looks at a life-long career engaging with the real and imagined landscape,” she said.

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“The exhibition highlights the rich resources of Bundanon that are part of Boyd’s national legacy, which we are delighted to see tour Australia.

“We hope to see the exhibition complete its tour by returning to Bundanon as the inaugural exhibition for the new gallery in the Masterplan development at Riversdale, scheduled to open in 2021.”

Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul focuses on Boyd’s diverse notions of landscape and traces one of the most celebrated careers in the history of Australian art through this lens.

A number of never-before-seen works created by Boyd as a teenager will be presented.

The exhibition offers the first in depth look at the artist’s powerful early grasp of the landscape as a subject.

Bookended by Boyd’s youthful paintings of the Mornington Peninsula in the 1930s and the final phase of his career depicting the Shoalhaven area in southern NSW in the mid-1970s, Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul considers not only the topographic landscape, but also the landscape Boyd carried within himself.

As a personal friend of Boyd, guest curator Barry Pearce brings a unique insight to his curatorial role, allowing this exhibition to move beyond the traditional academic understanding of Boyd’s career and delve deeper into the rich personal landscape of the acclaimed Australian artist.

“Boyd’s profound delirium of light and dark, swinging between euphoria and apprehension through diverse notions of landscape over almost half a century, is the focus of this exhibition,” he said.

“The story of Arthur Boyd is one of genius evolving out of childhood innocence to which in some ways, through extraordinary complexity, it returned at the end of a long productive life. His was an artist’s odyssey through landscape both seen and imagined.”

The exhibition will feature work from four distinct periods:

- Prelude: works of Boyd’s parents and grandparents.

- Genesis: Boyd’s early years from when he was an adolescent until when he left Australia. 1930–1959.

-  Between Worlds: Boyd’s works while he was in the UK.

-  The Shoalhaven Years: Boyd’s work from 1971 until the end.

The 1100 hectare property at Bundanon was gifted to the Australian people in 1993 by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd and remains one of the largest donations in Australian cultural history.

Bundanon Trust celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2018 and continues to operate the property as a centre for creative arts, education, scientific and environmental research and artist residencies.

The Bundanon Trust Masterplan unveiled in 2017 includes a redesign of Riversdale by Kerstin Thompson Architects including a 380 square metre light-filled contemporary art gallery that will house the Trust’s $43 million art collection featuring more than 1300 works by Arthur Boyd along with works by Boyd’s contemporaries Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman.