Avant-gardism for Children

About the exhibition
Avant-gardism for Children brought together the work of contemporary artists who approached their practices with material resourcefulness and a distinct sense of play. Taking inspiration from Robert Rooney’s term ‘playschool fabrications’  he used in 1996 to describe the improvisational exuberance of an exhibition by Mikala Dwyer, curator Helen Nicholson identified a connection between the working methods of much contemporary art and the simple yet imaginative making activities—often involving everyday household items—featured on beloved children’s television program Play School.

This was not an exhibition celebrating children's or ‘naïve’ art . Rather, it sought to foreground spontaneous and informal ways of making art, while extending the possibilities presented by modernist abstraction. Materially, the exhibition emphasised artists’ use of amateur and non-art materials, including Texta and lipstick (Elizabeth Newman), margarine lids and paper plates (Elizabeth Gower), plasticine (Leni Hoffmann) and cereal box graphics (Robert Rooney).

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
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^{Image: Elizabeth Newman, Post-Industrial 1991. Collection of the artist}