Tableaux: Works from the University Collection

About the exhibition
Tableaux presented over fifty works from the Monash University Collection, arranged under four conceptual groupings—the sublime, floral, geometric and suburbia—to explore thematic resonances across both recent and historical acquisitions.

The sublime was represented, for example, by Lynne Boyd’s vaporous and atmospheric painting And at every drifting cloud that went with sails of silver by, 1989—a partly abstracted landscape directly inspired by her vision of Port Phillip Bay and the undulating You Yangs. Works on paper by Peter Graham were also featured, including Now My Song is Sung, 1994—a subterranean evocation of birds in flight.

Floral motifs emerged in Charles Blackman’s Face Amidst Flowers ,1955, from his Alice in Wonderland series, suggestive here of the long-standing metaphoric association of flowers with innocence and transience. In contrast, Maria Kozic’s Read This (Daisies), 1990, violently subverts those associations, challenging traditional notions of virtue and beauty.

The geometric was represented by Tim Johnson’s funnel-shaped canvas Yellow Slip, 1970, and Elizabeth Newman’s Untitled, 1987, a blue field inscribed with a wobbling yellow square—an ironic meditation on the aesthetic purity and aura of formal abstraction.

Suburbia found expression in Bill Henson’s Untitled, 1985/86, a suite of moody, transitory photographs capturing recognisable suburban sites of western Melbourne , and Victor Meertens’s Menin, 1986, a sculptural work where corrugated folds suggest the ghost of post-industrial urban and agricultural structures.

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: Tim Maguire, Hollyhocks 1991, colour lithograph on paper, 75.5 x 91.5 cm (sheet), 68.5 x 84 cm (image). Collection of Monash University, Melbourne. Purchased 1993}