Design and Art Australia Online

The 1968 exhibition was curated in 1995 by Michael Desmond and Christine Dixon and was drawn entirely from the National Gallery of Australia’s collection.
It celebrates the time of change, in the two years on either side of 1968 – a time of political and social unrest, when art and life combined to stretch barriers.
The exhibition integrated both popular and avant garde works from Australian artists, designers and news photographers with those from the USA and UK. The resulting exhibition showed the energy and strength of the young Australian artists of this generation.

The Field was the first temporary exhibition in the newly opened National Gallery of Victoria building in St Kilda Road. Its curators, John Stringer and Brian Finemore, proudly proclaimed its partisanship as it celebrated the work of a new generation of Australian abstract artists.
“It is not impartial and comprehensive. It is biassed to define one particular direction in contemporary Australian art,” they wrote.
The Field was held a year after MoMA’s Two Decades of American Painting travelled to Sydney and Melbourne, and both its content and its catalogue were significantly influenced by that exhibition. Its professional production as much as the content of the lively hard edge abstract works encouraged the perception that this was the avant garde in Australia in 1968.
In 2018, the 50th anniversary of The Field, the National Gallery of Victoria recreated the exhibition at Federation Square.