Spowers & Syme and A Matter of Looking: 20th century works from the QUT Art Collection Floor Talk
Join QUT Galleries and Museums Engagement Officer, Renae Belton on a tour of Spowers & Syme and A Matter of Looking: 20th century works from the QUT Art Collection at QUT Art Museum.
Celebrating the artistic friendship of Naarm/Melbourne artists Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, the National Gallery Touring Exhibition Spowers & Syme will present the changing face of interwar Australia through the perspective of two pioneering modern women artists.
The exhibition offers rare insight into the unlikely collaboration between the daughters of rival media families. Studying together in Paris and later with avant-garde printmaker Claude Flight in London, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme returned to the conservative art world of Australia – where they became enthusiastic exponents of modern art in Naarm/Melbourne during the 1930s and ‘40s.
Much-loved for their innovative approach to lino and woodcut techniques, Spowers & Syme showcases their dynamic approach through prints and drawings whose rhythmic patterns reflect the fast pace of the modern world through everyday observations of childhood themes, overseas travel and urban life.
Spowers & Syme is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Visions of Australia, Major Patron David Thomas AM, and the Gordon Darling Foundation. Spowers & Syme is a Know My Name project.
A Matter of Looking introduces audiences to rarely seen paintings, prints and drawings by female artists across the broad spectrum of the 20th century held in the QUT Art Collection. We often forget that art is fundamentally about not only looking visually, but truly seeing with the mind’s eye. This exhibition celebrates the role of the audience to bring into being an artist’s work, ideas and imagination. Life is so multifarious that it can be easier to ration our attention— we semi-look, we skim, we glance, and overlook the effort required to view art in a serious, focused manner. A Matter of Looking calls us to immerse ourselves in the simple act of looking, in the hopes of not only discovering the extraordinary art produced by female artists of the last century, many of which will be unfamiliar names, but also experiencing something life-affirming.
Image credit: Ethel Spowers, Balloons c. 1920, drawing in black ink, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Gift of Chris Montgomery 1993.
Organisers will photograph and record events for use in marketing and communications. If you do not wish to be photographed and recorded please advise staff upon arrival.
For any queries, contact QUT Art Museum on +61 7 3138 1384 or artmuseum@qut.edu.au.