Major exhibitions – or blockbusters as they are often known – are an important part of a gallery’s ecology. The drive audiences. They add a bit of program panache. And they add a bit of international clout.
But they are also expensive, and often feel “stale” as an offering.
This week (3 June) the next summer exhibitions under the Sydney International Art Series banner have been announced. They are anything but stale. Three very diverse artists – the iconic surrealist master, Belgium artist René Magritte, the cyber futurist videos of Chinese artist Cao Fei and the expanded painting practice of US artist Julie Mehretu – make their way to Sydney with exhibitions that promise to enchant, enthral and excite.
They will be presented at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), with NSW Minister for the Arts, John Graham describing them as ‘three of the most recognised and influential artists of their respective generations’.
What to expect to see for Magritte
More than 80 paintings by René Magritte (1898–1967) will make their way to Sydney in Australia’s most comprehensive look at his work to date. They come from some of the world’s top collections, including the Menil Collection (Houston), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Musée d’Ixelles (Brussels) and Musée Magritte (Brussels) among others.
Viewers can expect to see defining paintings such as The false mirror (Le faux miroir) 1929, The listening room (La chambre d’écoute) 1952 and Golconda (Golconde) 1953, along with other renditions of the pipes, bowler hats, clouds and green apples that defined his oeuvre.
Presented chronologically, the exhibition will stretch from his earliest works to those painted in his final years before his death in 1967. There will also be rarely seen photography, film and archival materials allowing a greater insight into this much loved artist.
Magritte has been described as ‘a painter of ideas’, and this exhibition coincides with the centenary year of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). The exhibition has been curated by Nicholas Chambers, AGNSW Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary International Art.
The immersive videos of Cai Fei
Cao Fei: My City is Yours is the first Australian exhibition by Guangzhou-born, Beijing-based Cao Fei (b. 1978), who was voted by ArtReview magazine in 2023 as one of the art world’s 10 most influential people.
Her works have documented China’s rapid urbanisation and digital revolution, turning the contemporary metropolis into mesmerising films, photography and large-scale interactive and immersive installations. Like Magritte, her environments and view of the world have a surreal edge, updated for our times.
For Sydney, viewers will step into her cyber futurism, entering the exhibition via a replica 1960s Beijing cinema foyer, and exiting through a homage to the iconic, now-closed Sydney yum cha joint, the Marigold.
The exhibition as been designed as a kind of cityscape, where viewers move through a world of neon, street dance and pop music. It is both ‘familiar and warped, real and virtual,’ according to the Gallery, and offers ‘a space of play and self-reinvention, where cosplayers and hip-hop dancers take over sidewalks in Fukuoka and New York’.
The space has been designed by the artist and Beau Architects (Hong Kong), creating an 1300-square metre interactive space in AGNSW’s new Naala Badu building. It will also include two major Sydney-specific commissions by the artist, debuting as part of the exhibition.
‘My City is Yours … is an invitation to traverse the fantastic imaginaries of 21st century China, an era of acceleration and hyperconnectivity, of slippages between the physical and the virtual, radiating from Beijing to Sydney, folding one city with another,’ says co-curator Nicholas Chambers, who has worked with AGNSW’s Curator of Film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, and Curator of Chinese art, Yin Cao to deliver the exhibition.
Who is Julie Mehretu?
Similar to Cai Fei, Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu was named by Time magazine as one of the ‘100 most influential people in 2020’. It is not surprising given her paintings’ ‘capacity to convey the interconnectedness, energy and urgencies of our globalised world,’ as described by the MCA.
In a first for not only Australia but the southern hemisphere, her work will be shown in depth this summer, with more than 80 paintings and works on paper dating from 1995 to the present. There will also be new works created especially for the exhibition.
Mehretu’s paintings are known for their scale, which is often monumental and referencing architecture and past civilisations. Through their layering, they also take the pulse of our contemporary moment and interrogate pressing topics such as migration, climate change and uprisings.
Curator of the exhibition, MCA Director Suzanne Cotter says Mehretu, ‘is undoubtedly one of today’s most exciting living painters, and whose dynamic language of abstraction speaks so powerfully to the contemporary world in which we live’.
‘The experience of Mehretu’s paintings is nothing short of a visual and physical event.’
Of the work coming to Sydney, Mehretu says: ‘Abstraction is something that you cannot define, you cannot necessarily hold it… There aren’t any directives or proposals in these paintings. These paintings are experiential paintings that are informed by the time, by me, by this moment, by trying to digest that.’
Among the highlights of the exhibition will be Mehretu’s major cycle of nine paintings, Femenine in nine 2023, exuberant black paintings inscribed with iridescent gestural marks, and her TRANSpaintings, 2023-2024 series – a luminous new series of translucent free-standing paintings that are framed in aluminium sculptural supports conceived by Berlin-based sculptor Nairy Baghramian.
Viewers are invited to move around her works, and literally become immersed in their painterly expression.
Dates for your diary
Magritte
26 October – 9 February 2025
Naala Nura, Art Gallery of NSW south building
Cao Fei: My City is Yours
30 November – 13 April 2025
Naala Badu, Art Gallery of NSW north building
Julie Mehretu
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
29 November – 27 April 2025
All exhibitions are ticketed. The Sydney International Art Series is a NSW Government initiative through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW.
