ACMI’s new exhibition will light up Melbourne’s winter
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image is gearing up to present their newest and brightest exhibition using pieces from one of Britain’s most prestigious collections.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image is bringing brightness to a dark Melbournian winter, premiering a new exhibition inviting enthusiasts to see art in a totally different light.
Opening to the public on June 16, Light: Works from Tate’s Collection will feature 70 works spanning 200 years of art history using masterpieces from Tate, UK’s prestigious collection. The survey of work will include painting, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, and of course, the moving image, all encapsulating the theme of light.
Amongst the collection is Britain’s most famous painter JMW Turner, whose early 19th century work The Deluge (1805) will be on display in Australia for the first time, showcasing the brilliance of light bursting through a foreboding sky. Monet’s The Siene at Port-Villez (1894) will also be on featured along with a series of contemporary artists’ works including James Turrell’s trance-like LED installation Raemar, Blue (1969); Olafur Eliasson’s 2014 sculpture Stardust Particle and Tacita Dean’s 16mm film Lost at Sea (1996).
ACMI director Katrina Sedgwick said the task of drawing out interrelationships between artists, works, movements and mediums across two hundred years of creative practice had been fascinating, particularly the level of “experimentation” that let to ground-breaking artistic innovation.
“Over 200 years ago the great Romantic painter JMW Turner was exploring the behaviour of light, and we see this through seven of his works which feature in the exhibition – his experiments through technical drawings of light reflecting off different surfaces through to his extraordinary paintings,” Ms Sedgwick said.
“Equally, Lilian Lijn’s playful approach to the physics of light and matter is revealed in her kinetic sculpture Liquid Reflections (1968) - the result of over five years of experimentation, using perspex and light to evoke the movement of light particles.”
Encouraging audiences to reconsider the moving image from a different perspective by contextualising the medium within a broader art historical context, Light: Works from Tate’s Collection acknowledges that the moving image does not exist in a vacuum but feeds into and out of other creative disciplines.
Seeing the dialogues between works realised physically was a highlight of the curatorial process, with Ms Sedgwick adding that the exhibition “permits you to look both forward and back, both physically and across time periods to allow for compelling dialogue between the works”.
“It’s an opportunity for viewers to become completely immersed in light and perhaps defrag and reflect upon all that they’ve seen.”
The body of work from the Tate’s collection will be presented alongside ACMI’s permanent exhibition The Story of the Moving Image.
Tate’s director of international partnerships Neil McConnon said both institutions share a purpose to make art both accessible and relevant to a diverse audience.
“It is with great anticipation that we see the exhibition Light, which includes many of Tate’s most prized artworks from the breadth of the collection, travel to Melbourne to be enjoyed by a new generation of visitors in another part of the world.”
Light: Works from Tate’s Collection will run June 16 to November 13 as part of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
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