Geelong Gallery’s latest major survey exhibition, Mandy Martin—A Persistent Vision has opened, honouring the powerful work of the versatile, productive, bold, subtle and profound artist.
Offering attendees a powerful sense of the role and necessity of artists in society and celebrating a legacy, Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision is the latest major survey exhibition to arrive at the Geelong Gallery.
A critically acclaimed feminist artist from Adelaide, Mandy Martin (1952-2021) emerged and rose to prominence in the mid-1970s. Across a 45-year-long career, she earned an early reputation for politically charged screen prints. This established an ideological framework for her later landscape-based art practice that examined Australia’s European and industrial colonisation.
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around the region in the arts world here.
View this post on Instagram
Motivated by the ‘urgency to address the major issues of land use and exploitation in Australia’, Martin painted mostly in landscape, bringing crates of canvases or sketchbooks with her in order to develop an intimate connection with the land, and raised awareness of environmental issues through her projects in regional and remote Australia.
The painter, printmaker and teacher with a larger-than-life personality and larger-than-life artworks was an obvious choice for Geelong Gallery’s next major exhibition, with Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision drawn from an extensive gift of works made by Mandy Martin to Geelong Gallery in 2021.
“Prior to her death in 2021, I worked closely with the artist on a selection of 67 prints, drawings and paintings dating from 1975–2017 that encapsulate her career-long picturing of the power and politics of industry, and something of the impacts of human beings on natural environments,” explains Geelong Gallery Director & CEO Jason Smith.
“The gifted works, in addition to the Gallery’s existing holding of her work on show in this exhibition, encapsulates Martin’s career-long picturing of the power and politics of industry and the impacts of human beings on natural environments. This exhibition will present a powerful survey of Mandy Martin’s iconic industrial and land.”
Spanning intense and beautiful works of central Australian desert ranges, a dark industrial landscape or an exploding oil platform, this selection of breathtaking works not only captures the important story of Martin’s political printmaking and her early, acclaimed industrial subjects, but Martin’s gift also represents what would become a recurring format and subject: the coastal, panoramic landscape.
“Each of these emphases is appropriate for the Gallery’s collection, and the broader context of Geelong as a post-industrial city on Corio Bay,” says Smith.
View this post on Instagram
Painting until the very end, when the artist passed away due to cancer, Martin was determined to complete vital work in her lifelong campaign to lift the environmental consciousness of her fellow Australians.
Committed to continuing Martin’s work and honouring her gift with a major exhibition, as well as scheduling the exhibition to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the artist’s birth (18 November), this exhibition is especially poignant for Smith, whose 30-year friendship with the artist was influential in Smith exploring art as a career.
Meeting Martin at her local petrol station in Canberra when he was pumping fuel after college in the days of driveway service, an invitation to dinner via a mutual friend included a visit to her studio and confirmed Smith’s ambition to get into art school.
Since then, Smith – as a curator and museum director – has continually deepened his engagement with Martin’s work.
“What inspired as a young art student was the seriousness with which Mandy took her role as an artist, and her promotion of the idea that art had something to say; something to say that could transform understanding, shape our intellect and emotions,” Smith explains.
“From a purely visual point, the gestural, graphic mark of her work and her stark imagery of the early to mid-1980s was something that just captivated me. There was a confidence and an urgency to the imagery that I knew was beginning to shape my eye.”
View this post on Instagram
In a full circle moment, Smith’s ability to pay homage to an esteemed artist like Martin is felicitous with a survey of her lifelong commitment to nature and the environment, and her belief that artists – through the questioning and picturing of difficult subjects – can be agents of actual change.
“The opportunity to work closely with artists during their lifetime on the curation and presentation of major exhibitions that survey an aspect of their oeuvre, or are comprehensive retrospectives, has been a special privilege of my career. It is poignant professionally and personally to present this significant exhibition of Mandy’s work across five decades, but we are doing so because it is work that remains utterly relevant and deserves the eyes of new generations of gallery visitors.”
Surveying some of the iconic subjects that propelled Martin to widespread attention, the exhibition provides art lovers, both local and furher afield, a specific and partial representation of the artists’ wide-ranging intellectual and aesthetic work.
“The exhibition commences with Martin’s mid-1970s commentary on American imperialism and ends with the major 2017 collaborative installation Luminous relic, commissioned by Geelong Gallery for the 2017 Climarte Festival, and which is a lamentation for the effects of climate change on the ice caps.”
Mandy Martin- A Persistent Vision is on at the Geelong Gallery now until February 5 2023. This exhibition is free entry. Find out more here.
This article was made in partnership with Geelong Gallery.
