Heide Museum of Modern Art has revealed highlights from its 2020 program, including Australia’s first in-depth exhibition of celebrated modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth, a major survey of renowned Australian artist Joy Hester’s haunting works on paper, and plans for a Healing Garden.
Next year’s program builds on the museum’s longstanding commitment to support and present the work of women artists with a significant retrospective of Australian sculptor Margel Hinder, the Australian premiere of award-winning Polish artist Agnieszka Polska, and solo exhibitions by contemporary artists Carolyn Eskdale and Stanislava Pinchuk (aka Miso). Heide will also stage the first museum survey of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen in Melbourne.
In addition to the exhibition program, Heide will open their new Healing Garden in 2020. Inspired by Heide founder Sunday Reed’s profound love for her garden and designed by the Heide gardening team in collaboration with award-winning landscape architects Openwork, the Healing Garden draws on the curative qualities of plants and the natural environment to provide a place for relaxation, joy, and rejuvenation for all visitors, but particularly for vulnerable communities. Work will begin on the garden in January 2020, with a public opening slated for later in the year.
“2020 is an exciting year for Heide,” said Lesley Harding, Artistic Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art. “We are thrilled to present the first-ever in-depth exhibition of the renowned work of Barbara Hepworth to be shown in this part of the world, and to stage alongside it a survey of Australia’s own ground-breaking modernist woman sculptor, Margel Hinder. We also look forward to beginning work on the Healing Garden – a soothing place for sensory experiences.”
Set on sixteen acres of parkland with Yarra River frontage, Heide Museum of Modern Art, or Heide as it is affectionately known, is one of Australia’s most important cultural institutions. Once a significant Wurundjeri gathering place, the property was later a dairy farm before becoming known as a hub for Australian modernist art and writing after it was purchased by art patrons John and Sunday Reed in 1934.
The Reeds opened their home to the most progressive artists of their era, including Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval, Charles Blackman and Danila Vassilieff. Nolan’s famous Ned Kelly series (1946–47) was painted in the dining room of the Heide farmhouse. Continuing this spirited legacy, today Heide works to inspire creative talent, collaborating with emerging and mid-career artists as well as celebrating those who have made major contributions to Australian and international art.
For more information about Heide Museum of Modern Art, visit: www.heide.com.au for details.
Image: Robert Owen, Hammer on Rock #1, 1982 hammer, lead, paper, acrylic, pigment, light, and recorded sound of running water and Japanese gong 40 x 150cm, room 260 x 400 x 400cm. Installation view: Coventry Gallery, Sydney
Heide Museum of Modern Art 2020 exhibition program:
CAROLYN ESKDALE: MEMORY HORIZON
Heide Modern: 15 February to 14 June 2020
In Memory Horizon, Carolyn Eskdale presents new work that responds to the unique modernist architecture of Heide Modern and animates the former residence as its own cast object. After working in the space over the course of a year, Eskdale has developed a sculptural language of motifs and forms that are specific to the site. The exhibition explores the history of the building as both a domestic and public space, considering the interstices between private and public life and the overlap between the studio and the gallery.
PHOTO 2020: AGNIESZKA POLSKA
Kerry Gardner and Andrew Myer Project Gallery: 21 March to 14 June 2020
Heide Museum of Modern Art will present the Australian premiere of Agnieszka Polska’s work during the inaugural PHOTO 2020. Polska is an innovative Polish artist who investigates society’s shared experiences of environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Her award-winning video The New Sun, features a projection of the sun personified as an animated character bearing witness to the Earth’s increasing environmental calamity.
JOY HESTER: REMEMBER ME
Heide Galleries: 21 March to 14 June 2020
Joy Hester: Remember Me is an ambitious survey of the oeuvre of remarkable modernist artist Joy Hester, who produced some of the most distinctive and intriguing imagery to emerge in Australia during the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition offers new insight into Hester’s practice and traces her trajectory from her formative works and her responses to World War II to her compelling psychological portraits and later series of faces and lovers.
STANISLAVA PINCHUK (Miso)
Heide Modern: 27 June to 11 October 2020
Ukraine-born Stanislava Pinchuk is one of the most intriguing contemporary artists working today. This exhibition showcases powerful drawings that capture the changing topographies of war through data mapping as well as terrazzo sculptures containing the detritus left behind by conflict—fragments of tiles, shotgun shells, SIM cards, plastics and tar. In her work Pinchuk plots both the physical features of the land as well as the more abstract yet enduring residues of trauma.
ROBERT OWEN
Heide Galleries: 27 June to 4 October 2020
The first museum survey of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen’s work in Melbourne will be presented in the main exhibition space, Heide Galleries. Grounded in geometry and abstraction, Owen’s works are inspired by his diverse interests – encompassing philosophy and psychology, science and mathematics, music and literature – and reflect his incessant curiosity about the world. This exhibition will explore Owen’s varied 60-year career and feature new and more recent paintings and sculptural installations.
MARGEL HINDER: MODERN IN MOTION
Heide Modern: 17 October 2020 to 21 February 2021
Opening in June 2020 is the first dedicated retrospective of the work of vanguard modernist sculptor Margel Hinder. Revealing one of the most dynamic yet overlooked sculptural practices to have developed in Australia during the mid-twentieth century, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion explores the artist’s expansive creative vision and sense of the world in perpetual movement.
BARBARA HEPWORTH: IN EQUALIBRIUM
Heide Galleries: 24 October 2020 to 28 February 2021
The doyenne of modernist sculpture, Barbara Hepworth’s singular approach to form and abstraction over the course of her five-decade-long career garnered international acclaim and inspired countless artists worldwide. The first major survey of her work in Australia, this landmark exhibition underscores Hepworth’s foundational importance to the development of modernism in Australasia.
Developed in consultation with the artist’s granddaughter, Sophie Bowness, the exhibition brings together key works from institutional and private collections in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue. Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the exhibition complements Heide’s concurrent survey of the work of lauded British sculptor, Barbara Hepworth.