Europe & Back: Australian Artists’ Installation

About the exhibition
This exhibition was conceived as an opportunity to bring together three Australian artists—John Lethbridge, Robert Owen and Tony Trembath—each of whom had recently exhibited installations in Europe. Curator Jenepher Duncan invited the artists to develop new, site-specific installation works for the Monash University Gallery, drawing on ideas and forms shaped during their time in Germany, Italy and France. Writing for the exhibition catalogue, artist Ian Howard notes that all three artists recalled the sense of difference and strangeness they experienced in their new environments.

Tony Trembath contributed monumental, adaptable cardboard structures that shaped the viewer’s movement through space. John Lethbridge’s Drop in the Ocean, 1989, offered an atmospheric intersection of large-format Cibachrome photographs and sculptural objects. Robert Owen’s floor and wall–based installation, the latest in a series of works inspired by an image of Lake Tekapo, Aotearoa New Zealand, featured a mound of glass jars filled with water, a thin strip of mirror running along the gallery walls and the inscription: ‘I change, I am the same.’

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Tony Trembath, Passages and Wells: Some Aspects of an Old Friend 1989, cardboard boxes and paper tape, four elements, each 310 x 205 x 205 cm. Installation view, Europe & Back: Australian Artists’ Installation, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1989.}