Geelong Gallery has announced its next major exhibition, Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision, which will open on Saturday November 5.
Mandy Martin was an internationally acclaimed Australian artist whose career spanned 45 years and whose works grace the walls of the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Parliament House, the Guggenheim Museum and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art.
Shortly before her death in July, 2021, Martin gifted the gallery a selection of 67 prints, drawings and paintings dating from 1975-2017, a capsule of works that Geelong Gallery director and CEO Jason Smith said was a “wonderful, wonderful gift”.
“Mandy’s work is dispersed among many, many collections and it’s fabulous that we have an opportunity to represent so much of her oeuvre,” Mr Smith said.
Martin was a progressive feminist artist who held an active commitment to the environment and examined through her work the European and industrial colonisation of Australia.
Smith said the selected works, many of them prints and based around themes of industrialisation, matched with both Geelong’s history as an industrial city and the gallery’s standing collection of printed art.
“Mandy had conducted a very long examination in her work of industrial subject matter, and she wanted Geelong to tell something of the industrial story in her work,” Mr Smith said.
“Also, one of our specialties here in Geelong is Australian printmaking, so she decided we should have as much of her print history as we possibly could.
“This collection, and the half-dozen other she worked with before she died, all tell a particular story, and they’re all complementary and they make sense.”
Mr Smith, who had a close friendship and professional relationship with Martin since studying under her at university, said the gallery had decided to run the exhibition to coincide with her birthday in November.
“The show will open on the fifth of November and run through what would have been her 70th birthday,” he said.
“It’s touching and very meaningful. She was a very, very important and influential artist and a dear friend and mentor.”
Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision will be showing at the Geelong Gallery from November 5, 2022, to February 5, 2023.
