Lecture | Jeffrey Smart: A voyage around stillness | Barry Pearce

Jeffrey Smart: A voyage around stillness

Barry Pearce

SOLD OUT but tickets available for lecture on March 10th by Leon van Schaik

Exhibition on until March 31st 2013.

 

Morning practice, Baia 1969, oil on canvas, 58 x 81 cm, Collection Mr and Mrs Dick and Barbara Senn, California, USA, © the artist

Lecture by Barry Pearce, Curator of Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart paintings 1940-2011 and Emeritus Curator, Art Gallery of NSW. This special lecture by the exhibition curator will focus on Jeffrey Smart’s preoccupation with time and stillness, and the eternal contradiction of those two elements within his technological landscape vision, which is finally resolved in the artist’s very last painting, Labyrinth, completed just before his retirement in 2011.

Date: 4:00pm – 5:00pm, Sunday 10 February 2021

Venue: Tarrawarra Museum of Art, 311 Healesville – Yarra Glen Rd, Healesville

Bookings: Bookings essential, limited numbers, $20 adults, $15 students. Book online at www.twma.com.au or email museum@twma.com.au or phone (03) 5957 3100

About the Exhibition: TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA), in partnership with the Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, presents Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart paintings 1940-2011, a definitive survey exhibition of the work of one of Australia’s most important living painters. The exhibition runs until March 31st, 2013.

The exhibition provides an extraordinary opportunity to experience the complete scope of this significant artist, ranging from the early years through to his best known and most iconic paintings.

Barry Pearce, the exhibition curator and Emeritus Curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales has assembled a selection of over forty major works from all major state galleries, the National Gallery of Australia, regional galleries and major private and corporate collections, to demonstrate Smart’s exceptional achievements over a long life in art and his exemplary contribution to Australian painting which continues today.

Jeffrey Smart’s work has been a part of Australian culture for more than half a century. The painter’s iconic urban landscapes have seeped into our national consciousness, and are among our most famous and beloved paintings. He is Australia’s master of the urban vision. Seeing beauty in the landscapes of modernism, his works feature industrial wastelands and concrete streetscapes with precise attention to clean lines, composition and geometry.

Smart recently retired from painting at the age of ninety. So it is now possible to define his career from beginning to end. The artist was awarded the Order of Australia in 2001 for services to visual arts, and in 2011 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of South Australia.