Australia and New Zealand
Art from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Aboriginal and Māori traditions, colonial and modern landscape, and contemporary art and design.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Australia and New Zealand are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The oldest art in the region belongs to Aboriginal Australians, whose rock paintings and engravings span tens of thousands of years and whose painting movements, from Arnhem Land bark to the Western Desert acrylics of the 1970s, remain central to Australian art today. In New Zealand, Māori carvers decorated meeting houses, canoes and treasured objects with spiralling relief, a practice still taught and renewed.
Settler artists first wrestled with unfamiliar light and land. The Heidelberg School painters, among them Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, worked outdoors near Melbourne in the 1880s and 1890s. Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings of 1946–47 and Fred Williams's sparse, dotted landscapes of the 1960s gave the bush a modern form. In New Zealand, Colin McCahon joined landscape with painted scripture. Later names span photography and design, from Tracey Moffatt's staged images to Marc Newson's riveted aluminium Lockheed Lounge (1986).
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D960&w=3840&q=75)