Sublime: Contemporary Works

Sublime: Contemporary Works from the Collection is a stunning large scale exhibition featuring more than 20 of QAG’s most significant works and new acquisitions from its contemporary sculpture collection.

Exhibition curator and Head of International Art and the Australian Cinémathèque, QAGOMA, Kathryn Weir states that 'The exhibition brings together artists who engage with sacred architectures and widely different cultural histories, to create effects of wonder and uncertainty and differing representations of 'the sublime'.

A highlight is the recently acquired large scale HD video installation Space, Light, Art (Raumlichtkunst) c1926/2012 by Oskar Fischinger, pioneer abstract artist and filmmaker, which has its Australian premiere at QAG, fresh from a landmark reconstruction by the Centre for Visual Music in LA and showings in London, Paris and New York.

Also shown for the first time in QAG’s vast spaces are Timo Nassari’s Islamic architecture-inspired Epistrophy VI 2012, a highly polished geometrical form; Zilvinas Kempina’s Columns 2006, a virtual forest of ethereal columns created by VCR tapes and the suspended cloud-like shapes of Michael Sailstorfer's Wolken (Clouds) 2010, a vision comprising some 300 knotted tyre inner tubes.

Other works from the exhibition dabble with the sublime in the context of the Romantic Era, including Bill Henson’s mysterious island in a dramatic whirl of clouds, rocks and water and the early video work by Bill Viola - Chott el-Djerid (A portrait in light and heat) 1979, a 1999 gallery acquisition depicting extreme landsapes of ice and desert.