Hidden in the Faculty of Arts, the 23 year-old Macquarie University Art Gallery is one of the gems of the university, bringing intriguing themes of Australian art to students, staff and the public.
Four years to fruition: Salvatore Zofrea at his exhibition opening with former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, whose portrait is part of the exhibition.
Until the end of May, visitors can immerse themselves in a 60-year retrospective of painter Salvatore Zofrea, three-times winner of the Sulman Prize, who has also received a knighthood from the Italian government. His works hang in collections around Australia including in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Vatican.
Displaying more than 70 of Zofrea’s works, the Macquarie exhibition took four years to come to fruition. Senior Curator Rhonda Davis brought together works the artist had already donated to the University's permanent collection with loaned paintings from regional galleries in Manly, Orange, the Hawkesbury and Armidale, as well as the NSW Bar Association and many private collections.
“The exhibition had to be rescheduled so many times because of COVID-19 restrictions and we had to extend our borrowings from the other galleries, but we’re thrilled that at least here it is now!” Davis says.
On show: Salvatore Zofrea's 1979 Sulman Prize winning painting, The Water Trap, is part of the exhibition.
Former NSW premier Gladys Berjiklian attended the opening of the exhibition, and her portrait – a previous entry in the Archibald Prize – also graces the exhibition’s walls. “Salvatore has this perceptive way of accentuating Gladys’s features and casting them in a poetic light, which makes her look regal,” Davis says.
The luminosity of Zofrea’s paintings makes them memorable, she adds, and many of them capture the beauty of the bush and wildflowers near his home on acreage in Kurrajong on the slopes of the Blue Mountains.
The artists would come and picnic on [what is now] the Macquarie University campus and paint outdoors.
Exploring his religious side after a near-death experience in his 20s, the 76-year old artist has also depicted 101 of the 150 Psalms in artworks. “I hope he has enough time to finish the other 49,” says Davis.
The exhibition is held across two other satellite locations: at the Macquarie University Library and NSW Parliament House Fountain Court exhibition space
Students, staff and members of the public are welcome to visit the gallery’s changing exhibitions and the permanent collection between 10am to 5pm on weekdays.
Student curators
Looking to the future, a group of anthropology students involved in the PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) program are already researching and organising another exhibition that will happen in September this year.
Fine detail: PACE students Eliana and Roberto with Senior Curator Rhonda Davis, at work on an upcoming gallery exhibition.
This exhibition focuses on the Northwood Group, local painters who lived near Lane Cove and Ryde in the 1940s who included Lloyd Rees — who twice won the Wynne Prize for his landscape paintings — Roland Wakelin, George Feather Lawrence, John and Marie Santry, Douglas Dundas and Wilmotte Williams.
“The artists would come and picnic on [what is now] the Macquarie University campus and paint outdoors,” says Davis. “Then they’d also go back to Rees’ house and paint each other in the studio, so the exhibition will try to recreate the group’s transition from painting and drawing outdoors to the studio space indoors and how that served their art.”
As assistant curators, the PACE students will create a multimedia exhibition pairing photographs of the sites where the group painted alongside the actual artworks — many of them displayed in public for the first time.
Part of the community
The University gallery also works with visiting school groups and, until the pandemic, hosted a program with aged care homes for people living with dementia.
These seniors particularly enjoyed the abstract pieces more than traditional artworks, Davis says. “They loved the bright colours and big scale of the contemporary works and it prompted many of them to share other stories. Their carers said that engaging with the paintings improved their behaviour. They really valued going on an excursion and feeling part of the world.”
Davis hopes to restart the program now that restrictions have eased. Improved signage across the campus will direct people to the gallery so that more visitors can find this hidden gem more easily.
Some of the University’s permanent collection is displayed in the gallery but also across the campus in the library, faculties, hospital, clinics, administrative buildings and outdoor areas. Artworks include ceramics, textile, sculpture as well as photography, video and painting.
The highlights are works from notable Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander artists, as well as from emerging artists and lauded modernists such as Sidney Nolan, Grace Cossington-Smith, Margaret Preston, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd.
