Anna Varendorff

The 2026 MUMA Ian Potter Sculpture Court commission is by Narrm/Melbourne artist Anna Varendorff. The artist invites visitors to MUMA’s Ian Potter Sculpture Court to sit and make use of her sculptures in their work, life and play.

As a graduate of and now lecturer in Fine Art at Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA), Varendorff knows The Ian Potter Sculpture Court well. She has observed how people use the space and reflected on the surrounding built environment, and responded to it as a place of rest, meeting and conversation with a series of multiples, scattered throughout the courtyard in conversational clusters.

Varendorff, whose practice spans sculpture, installation, jewellery and object design, uses recycled materials, rejecting the planned obsolescence in which objects are made to be used and discarded.

The materials she scavenges bear the marks and dents of their passage through systems of economic and use value. In this new work, repetition is a virtue, she uses discarded security doors. These doors feature an often-seen diamond pattern which has become obsolete and is now being replaced with more current designs. It has been used frequently in public and Defence Force housing throughout Australia, invoking civic space as well as private property protection.

Varendorff has powder-coated the found security mesh in commercially available colours which are themselves influenced by council urban planning regulations. This register of colours on the repetitious pattern is a method of artistic restriction that nods to the Constructivist and Modernist grid and Colour Field painting of the mid-20^th Century, used by artists of the era to argue for art’s autonomy from narrative, emotion, context and beauty.

repetition is a virtue exists in a lineage of artists who challenge the boundaries between art and life including Franz West and Andrea Zittel whose functional sculptures invite the viewer to participate physically with the aim of inspiring greater awareness of social construction and the mind-body relationship. Located in the open space directly outside MUMA the commission offers a new interrogation of public art in a university museum context.

This new commission as part of MUMA’s Ian Potter Sculpture Court commission series. The project will feature as part of Melbourne Design Week, 14–24 May 2026.

_{Images: Anna Varendorff, repetition is a virtue, 2026. Installation view, Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art, 2026. Photo: Christian Capurro.}