An Afternoon at the Queensland Art Gallery

This past Sunday, Mum and I went into the Queensland Art Gallery to look at a couple of exhibitions, one that had it’s last day on Sunday and the other two had opened the day before and oh it was such a wonderful jaunt.The first was “Made for this World”, contemporary art & the places we build, which was an exhibition aimed to encourage children to look twice at the places around them, it had some great activities to do including making bridges or whatever structure you wished from short flexible bamboo skewers and masking tape using bridge drawings by Cai Guo Qiang as ideas. Another activity was to go dotty in Yayoi Kusama’s “The obliteration room 2002”, which has an online version here. The last hand-ons activity was Icelander Olafur Eliasson’s “The cubic structural evolution project 2004”, which invited patrons to build buildings out of white Lego pieces to be placed in a constantly evolving city (photo below).

The other two we went to see were Margaret Preston: Art and Life, which is an extraordinary exhibit of her paintings, monotypes and prints as well as photos and objects from her life. This exhibit is a traveling one organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, so if happens to visit a town near you, I strongly urge you to visit. The actual website of the exhibition is here.

The other was Grace Cossington Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition, which is also a traveling exhibition but organised by the National Gallery of Australia, the tour website is here and features an exhaustive online catalog of her work. We didn’t spend as much time in this one as we did in the Margaret Preston one but it was equally as amazing, I really liked how in comparision to Preston who I felt emphasised the structure of the flowers and buildings in her work, Cossington Smith emphasised the colours that she saw that made up her subjects not always the colours that we would see in a scene. Quite an enjoyable afternoon, which we finished off with a browse of the Art Gallery Shop 🙂