Brisbane Art Gallery

We took the ferry into the city. After meandering around the shops and exploring the comprehensive street market, the plan was to visit the city library, followed by lunch then home.

However the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art is next door to the library so we popped in for a quick look and stayed for over an hour. We went into the library but didn't stay because my feet were aching and we were hungry. We will visit another day and start with the library which looked amazing.

The art gallery is pretty amazing too.

Portrait of James Davis

by Carl Magnus Oscar Fristrom

James 'Duramboi' Davis had a colourful history. He was sent to Australia from Scotland as a convict. In 1824 aged 15 or 16 he was sentenced to seven years transportation to New South Wales for the theft of a coin from a church collection. Five years later in Sydney he was subsequently convicted of robbery and sentenced to a further three years imprisonment at Moreton Bay. Davis escaped from the penal colony and lived with the Indigenous Badtjala people on Fraser Island. The Badtjala accepted him and gave him the name Duramboi. He was recaptured in 1842.

He later became a successful business man in South Brisbane, where he owned a crockery shop. He died a wealthy man in 1889.

The Bathers by Rupert Bunny

Comet (Dance Machines)

by Patrick Thaidy

Thaidy's 'dance machines' are articulated objects that are central to Torres Strait Island performances. Comet represents the drama and intensity of a comet that appears only once every several centuries.

Shark by Ricardo Idagi

His works are inspired by mask and headdress-making traditions of the Torres Strait Islands. This interpretation is almost a life size replica of a real Tiger Shark. It's made from flakes of turtle shell, feathers, saimi seeds and string.

Fighter and Bomber aircraft headdresses

White Dove Feeling the Universe by Brett Whiteley

The Spirit of the New Moon by Arthur Loureiro

I like this one

  

I think this is beautiful

Spirit of the Plains

The artist Sydney Long thought of the Australian landscape as a special, dreamlike place. The painting features the Brolga Crane - a wetland bird found in Northern Australia. They are known for their intricate dance, during which they toss pieces of grass into the air, leap into the sky, bob their heads, beat their wings, strut and bow even making a trumpeting sound.

   

Karla Dickens work is an ongoing interrogation of the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and their effects on Aboriginal cultures and the natural world. The installation above confronts the breadth of environmental devastation across Australia - such as rising temperatures, exploitation of resources, drought, extinction, floods and coral bleaching.

   

You can just about see the crows at the top of the images. The waagan (crow in Wiradjuri) acts as a guardian and messenger throughout the installation. Dickens says "I believe my ancestors are visiting if the crows appear. The crows give me strength to fly above my shadows as I walk this life searching for connection and meaning".

Each piece of work is punctuated by her signature tongue-in-cheek text, puns, metaphor and black humour.

'Keeping It Together' depicts forest of glove poles bound together with raffia and twine and symbolises the tenuous feeling of trying to hold the world together as it falls apart.

Many Hong Kong residents live in high-rise buildings. Artist Yeung Tong Lung created this group of paintings by looking out the window of his studio and painting what he saw.

Woodcut print on canvas by Muhlis Lugis

        Betal-nut palm                     Banana               Temple tree, Frangipani                                                                                  my favourite Australian flower

'Paradisus Terestris' by Fiona Hall is a set of fifteen aluminium and tin sardine cans, each revealing a human erogenous zone or body-part. Sprouting above these are botanically correct representations of native flora, implying a collision between Culture and Nature. Each component of the work bears three titles: the local Aboriginal plant name specific to the language group indicated in parentheses, the Latin (botanical) name, and the common English name.

I couldn't photograph them all because there was too much reflection. 

And in a lot of art galleries I have visited there is always something that I just don't get

Untitled by Gunter Christmann

I'm not sure what title I would give it, maybe

Rectangle of grey paint

with a rectangle of black paint underneath

in a blue frame.

Really?

And finally 

The sentence on the screen was constantly changing, I only caught two - "social structure"  and "I am whispering"  I was puzzled. Art is definitely subjective!

∼ Be safe and well∼ 

Polly x