The Penrith Regional Gallery’s collection originated with the gift of some 200 works by artists Margo and Gerald Lewers, whose many years of living and working on this site continued its centuries-long tradition as a place of culture and creative exchange. Since 1991, over 2000 works have been added to the collection, extending the legacy of experimentation embedded in the Lewers’ practices. The Gallery’s rich holdings of 20th century Australian abstraction and expressionism have in turn expanded, embracing the work of contemporary artists whose outputs are characterised by a sustained engagement with alternative ways of seeing, knowing and depicting, and by the powerfully insightful re-presentation of established visual languages.
This selection of works from the Gallery’s collection celebrates four of the foremost Australian exemplars of this movement. Brook Andrew (b. 1970), Daniel Boyd (b. 1982), Lorraine Connelly-Northey (b. 1962) and Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960) are acclaimed for bodies of work which have explored the alternative, imaginative capacity of figuration, thereby helping to reshape the way we see and understand archival sources and historical narratives as well as ubiquitous imagery and materials. Erasure, obfuscation and re-configuration are among the strategies employed by Andrew and Boyd to undermine myths of national history, imbuing museum specimens and colonial images with transcendent qualities. Connelly-Northey likewise transforms discarded, neglected or broken materials – such as the rusted wire connoting dispossession and containment – into cultural objects of remarkable beauty. And Moffatt established international renown with her early works, in which pop-culture modes like movies, television and glossy photography are appropriated to create unsettling reflections on issues such as race, gender, and inter-generational trauma.
All four artists are thus adept at what Andrew has identified in his own work as ‘re-divining’: a practice of fashioning new mythologies and uncovering subsumed stories by seeing the magical, the beautiful and the powerful in the questionable, the maligned and the mundane.
