Light shines on contemporary art from the Wesfarmers Collection

Luminous World brings together a selection of contemporary paintings, objects and photographs from the Collection in a conversation about light. 

Wesfarmers is one of Australia’s largest listed companies, the parent company of several of Australia’s leading retail brands, including Coles, Bunnings, Target and Kmart among many others. The company has collected Australian art for over three decades. 

From then General Manager John Bennison’s first acquisition in 1977 of a pastoral scene by the Australian impressionist Elioth Gruner, the purpose of Wesfarmers Arts has been to accentuate the value of art in the workplace and encourage an understanding of the importance to society of supporting creative thinking and artistic vision.

The Wesfarmers Collection comprises paintings, photographs, works on paper and sculpture by leading Australian artists from the colonial period through to contemporary times. In recent years, the scope of the collection has expanded to include work by leading New Zealand artists and a greater emphasis placed on representing the rich diversity of contemporary Australian Indigenous art.

The collection is shared with the community through an active loan and exhibition program.

Director of the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne Kelly Gellatly says through works of scale and conceptual invention that chart the range and depth of the Wesfarmers Collection, Luminous World presents 60 significant contemporary paintings, photographs and objects by some 50 leading Australian and New Zealand artists. 

“In its symbolic resonance and physical manifestations, the subject of light offers an ever-expanding array of possibilities for art today, embracing exploration of the properties of light from the perspective of the optical experience, the connection between the movements of the stars and the cycles of life on earth; and the diversity of cultural, mythic and spiritual ideas with which light has come to be associated.”

Artists represented in the exhibition include Susan Norrie, Rosemary Laing, Howard Taylor, Dale Frank, Paddy Bedford, Bill Henson, Fiona Pardington (NZ), Brian Blanchflower, Brook Andrew, Timothy Cook and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.

“These artists traverse a diversity of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical perspectives in works that reveal the role light plays in both creating and revealing our world,” Ms Gellatly says, “from an enduring fascination with the way in which life on earth is bound to events playing out in the celestial realm, to the influence on the contemporary imagination of the universe of artificial light in which we live today.

The exhibition is on at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne from Tuesday 31 March. 

www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au