Design and Art Australia Online

Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007) was one of the finest architectural and industrial photographers working in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1995, through the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne purchased from Wolfgang Sievers 141 photographs with accompanying negatives. The fifty-seven black and white exterior and interior views of buildings in this exhibition were taken between 1956 and 1976, a period of great development at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus.

This exhibition is a rare opportunity to consider nearly twenty years in Australian art from the perspective of the artist Raafat Ishak, who began exhibiting in Melbourne in the early 1990s. Ishak’s involvement in many activities including: artist-run initiatives, collaborations with friends, site-specific projects, small-scale painting, and art that comes off the stretcher onto walls and floor, indicate many of the key characteristics of his generation. In this exhibition, Ishak responds specifically to the architecture of the museum.

Yvonne Audette is a senior Australian artist who is regarded as a key figure in the development of abstract painting by Australian artists. Audette’s remarkable career spans six decades, and this exhibition includes more than fifty works from 1950 to the present. Evocative and richly layered, these lyrical, abstract works reflect the artist’s response to her immediate as well as imagined environment. Paintings that explore the development of Audette’s practice and the full spectrum of her career have been selected, and have mostly been drawn from the artist’s collection.

This exhibition is the first survey of the work of Vivienne Shark LeWitt at an Australian art museum. Shark LeWitt is a mid-career artist who maintains a unique presence in Australian art. She makes intimately scaled paintings and works on paper in a deceptively winsome style, where the size and delicacy of the work belies its emotional and poetic impact. Shark leWitt presents vignettes of emotional vulnerability, many of which speak of the subtle gender politics and power plays of everyday life.