Title

Max & Olive: The photography life of Olive Cotton and Max Dupain.

Collective title

National Gallery of Australia travelling exhibition

Venues

Riddoch Art Gallery (18 March 2016 – 8 May 2016)

Ian Potter Museum of Art. (31 May 2016 – 24 July 2016)

Cowra Art Gallery. (6 August 2016 – 4 September 2016)

Wangaratta Art Gallery. (10 September 2016 – 13 November 2016)

Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre. Broadhurst Gallery. (17 December 2016 – 5 February 2017)

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. (12 May 2017 – 9 July 2017)

Date

(2016 – 2017)

Summary

Multi-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (ACT). Photographs.

Curator

Lakin, Shaune.

Web address

https://nga.gov.au/exhibitions/max-olive/

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

Olive Cotton and Max Dupain are key figures in Australian visual culture. They shared a long and close personal and professional relationship. This exhibition looks at their work made between 1934 and 1945, the period of their professional association; this was an exciting period of experimentation and growth in Australian photography, and Cotton and Dupain were at the centre of these developments.

This is the first exhibition to look at the work of these two photographers as they shared their lives, studio and professional practice. Looking at their work together is instructive; they were often shooting the same subjects, or pursuing subjects and pictorial effects in similar ways. Comparisons articulate and make apparent Dupain's more structured – even abstracted – approach to art and to the world; similarly, comparisons highlight Cotton's more immersive relationship to place, with a particularly deep and instinctual love of light and its ephemeral effects.

This exhibition focuses on the key period in each of their careers, when they made many of their most memorable images. Keenly aware of international developments in photography, Cotton and Dupain experimented with the forms and strategies of modernist photography, especially Surrealism and the Bauhaus, and drew upon the sophisticated lighting and compositions of contemporary advertising and Hollywood glamour photography.

They brought to these influences their own, close association with the rich context of Australian life and culture during the 1930s and '40s. Their achievement can be characterised, borrowing terms they used in discussions of their work, as the development of a 'contemporary Australian photography': a modern photographic practice that reflected their own, very particular relationships to the world and to each other.
Curated by Shaune Lakin (Senior Curator, Photography).

[National Gallery of Australia media, 2016].

Last Updated

09 Aug 2024