Exclusive to Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), the first Victorian showing of Bundanon Trust’s touring exhibition ‘Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul’ will be on display alongside SAM’s newly curated ‘The Boyd Family: a legacy of pottery’, from 14 September until 24 November and 14 March 2020 respectively.
Arthur Boyd, Shoalhaven as the River Styx, c.1996, oil on canvas. Boyd Family Collection
Courtesy Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria
‘Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul’ offers insight into the artist’s powerful early grasp of the landscape as a subject; ‘Boyd’s profound delirium of light and dark, swinging between euphoria and apprehension through diverse notions of landscape over almost half a century, is the focus of this exhibition,’ says curator Barry Pearce. It features more than 40 paintings, including a group of masterpieces borrowed from major state art museums, plus 20 works on paper as well as letters, photographs and sketchbooks, featuring works from Boyd’s adolescence through to his final years.
‘The Boyd Family: a legacy of pottery’ presents over 140 ceramic works by the Boyd family from the SAM Collection. Celebrating decoration, the domestic and the everyday, these works reveal how art and design intersected for the Boyd family and the influences and inspirations that crossed art, architecture, literature and life.
Dr Rebecca Coates, Director of SAM, says, ‘Together, these two exhibitions explore the trajectory of one of our nation’s most important artistic families. Landscape and nature inspired and influenced so many of the extended Boyd family, and Australian flora and fauna is celebrated and revealed in a myriad of ways in the paintings and ceramics featured in each exhibition.’
