A solo exhibition by world-renowned artist Chiharu Shiota and a summer blockbuster featuring immersive and large-scale artworks are among the highlights of the 2022 Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) program.
GOMA will be the exclusive Australian venue for Shiota’s The Soul Trembles, a major exhibition organised and toured by Japan’s Mori Art Museum, that’ll run from June 18 to October 3 and highlight 25 years of the Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist’s practice across large-scale installation, sculpture, video performance, photography and drawing.
Shiota’s signature wool installations have appeared in Melbourne, Adelaide, Tokyo, Venice and Madrid in recent years. Often embedded in the thread are objects: in Melbourne in 2016, two chairs sat out of reach at one end of the room, and in Venice in 2015, keys hung from the red web suspended over boats.
“Shiota is renowned internationally for her transformative installations constructed from millions of fine threads and works that express the intangible: memories, anxiety, dreams and silence,” QAGOMA director Chris Saines said in a press release. “This exhibition at GOMA is the largest solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date, and it will be a major drawcard for local and visiting audiences.”
The gallery’s blockbuster summer exhibition Air, opening November 26 and running until April 23, 2023, will present immersive and large-scale works by leading international and Australian artists across the entire ground floor of GOMA. The exhibition will explore the cultural, ecological and political dimensions of air.
Among the works will be favourites from the QAGOMA collection such as In Bed (2005) by Ron Mueck and Crossing (2016), a solid-light installation by Anthony McCall, along with major works by Dora Budor, Jonathan Jones and Dr Uncle Stan Grant Sr AM, and Carlos Amorales. There will also be a significant new commission by Argentinian contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno.
“The exhibition will be a journey through this invisible, ethereal and vital element, reflecting on awareness of our shared atmosphere as life-giving, potentially dangerous and rapidly warming,” Saines said.
From August 13 until January 22 over at QAG, Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art will feature new commissions and recent works by local artists such as Robert Andrew, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Megan Cope, Obery Sambo, Vanghoua Anthony Vue, Rosie Ware and Warraba Weatherall.
Among the works will be a vast installation of new paintings by Jenny Watson; a towering work by Erika Scott comprising fish tanks and found objects; a series of textural, shaggy rainforest shields by Girramay artist Ethel Murray; and a major new commission by Archie Moore on the QAG Watermall that addresses Aboriginal deaths in custody.
From August 27 to January 29, 2023, QAG will also present the first major museum survey of work by leading Australian painter Joe Furlonger.
“Joe Furlonger is well known for his expressive, painterly figurative images and vast landscapes,” Saines said. “This exhibition will trace the Queensland artist’s career through an expansive presentation of more than 80 works across a range of media from painting to ceramics, sculpture and drawing.”
Other exhibitions include Transitions, which brings together significant historical Aboriginal bark paintings and innovative contemporary First Nations works from the gallery’s collection. And an exhibition celebrating the vision and generosity of Queensland art collector and philanthropist James C Sourris AM, which will feature works by contemporary Australian artists such as Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, Gordon Bennett, Vivienne Binns, Bonita Ely, Robert Hunter, Peter Kennedy, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ross Manning, Rosslynd Piggott and Judy Watson.
