Seven artists from the John Kaldor Family Collection

This education kit was produced for the exhibition Seven artists from the John Kaldor Family Collection and presents text from the exhibition along with questions and activities for students in Years 7-12.

Click on an AGNSW collection image for more information and to view the work in the Gallery collection.

The John Kaldor Family Collection comprises over 200 artworks and is among the most significant donations of 20th and 21st century art to have been made to an Australian art museum. The collection was initiated by John Kaldor AM more than 50 years ago and since the 1990s it has been developed in collaboration with Naomi Milgrom AO. Today, the collection is renowned for its in-depth representation of some of the world’s most influential artists.

The display that opened on 30 May 2015 focuses on seven artists from Australia and around the world who have emerged since the 1990s: collaborative duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Paul Chan, Michael Landy, Ugo Rondinone, Wilhelm Sasnal and Daniel von Sturmer.

Conceived as a series of solo shows, each section has been developed in collaboration with the exhibiting artists to reveal the ongoing dialogue between the John Kaldor Family Collection and the artists who comprise it.

Main image: Installing Seven artists from the John Kaldor Family Collection. Exhibition curator Nicholas Chambers with some of Paul Chan's work. All artworks © Paul Chan

Questions and activities

What material and conceptual practices are evident in this exhibition? Are they any different to traditional artmaking? Argue your point of view, referencing artists in this exhibition as well as those from another time in art history.

How do the artworks in this exhibition challenge the audience? What do you think audiences expect from art today? What is expected of the audiences themselves?

How does this exhibition question your understanding of art?

What challenges might the artworks in the exhibition present to the curator, conservators, installation crew and public program staff at the Gallery? List some of the issues they may have had to consider.

What is the advantage of having a room for each artist? How does the display affect the exhibition's narrative? Why do you think it is important to have the artists involved in the display of their work?

Choose an artist from this exhibition who inspires you. Write a critique of their work and discuss the relevance of their art practice in today’s world.

Create a collaborative installation or a site-specific or conceptual artwork. Show influence from one of the artists in this exhibition. Invite other students in your year group to experience the work. Record and document their response. How do their responses compare with your initial thoughts?

Paul Chan

Born in Hong Kong and raised in the United States, Paul Chan is a publisher, activist
and visual artist. He is deeply interested in philosophy and literature, and is an astute observer of contemporary media culture.
His artworks are built on dense networks of social and cultural references. They probe big questions about art and life that rarely have clear resolutions.

Chan’s works are visually arresting and often
feel familiar and inviting. When we give them time, their bewildering complexity unfolds and offers glimpses of the anxieties lurking behind their alluring surfaces. Chan is careful never to allow his works to fully explain themselves and, much like our experience of life, we are left to navigate through them with questions rather than answers.

Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone works across a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, video and sound. He has a unique ability to draw these various elements together in installations that capture the strangeness, beauty and melancholy of existence.

In his installation, titled Golden days and silver nights, Rondinone has created an arrangement for two distinct strands of his practice: colourful and exacting mandala paintings that merge aspects of op art, colour field painting and pop; and brooding, large-scale landscape paintings on paper. Carefully orchestrating every aspect
of the space, Rondinone presents us with two rooms of identical proportions but vastly different atmospheres. Without a narrative to
link the spaces together, we are confronted with an abrupt emotional shift designed to upset our equilibrium.

The installation was developed by Rondinone in response to works acquired by John Kaldor and Naomi Milgrom, who together have assembled one of the world’s most significant collections of the artist’s work.

Daniel von Sturmer

Daniel von Sturmer’s practice is concerned with questions about perception. His installations beguile, confound and ultimately highlight the complex relationship between reality and depictions of reality. The present installation, Material from another medium, is an important early work that is shown here for the first time since it was first exhibited at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2001.

Architectural ideas underpin all aspects of the work: the composition of sets for the videos, the construction and arrangement of the installation and physical interventions into the gallery itself. As the artist has stated,

The point for me is to activate the viewer’s awareness of how they view the space and
walk through the gallery, how they interact
with the work and find meaning through the different correlations between, say, a video
and an object, a video and a structure, and
the architecture framing all of these things.
It is a question of interplay, negotiation and intervention.

Michael Landy

For Michael Landy, destruction has great creative and generative potential. It is a recurring technique that he employs both literally and metaphorically to explore themes of waste, consumerism and value.

The work of Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely (1925–91), who is renowned for his kinetic sculptures made from recycled materials, has profoundly influenced Landy’s practice. Of particular significance is Tinguely’s so-called ‘self-constructing and self-destroying work of art’ that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1960. The sculpture is referenced in two works installed in this room.

For the present installation Landy began with the charcoal drawing Machine to destroy the Tinguely Museum (2) 2010, which he digitally tore apart and then enlarged as a gigantic wall piece. Landy describes the process as one of ‘cannibalising’ his own work. The fragments of the drawing envelop the entire exhibition space and are used to link together a selection of works in the John Kaldor Family Collection and Naomi Milgrom Collection.

Wilhelm Sasnal

In a culture so inundated by visual imagery, Wilhelm Sasnal’s artworks seek moments of pause and reflection. Sasnal finds inspiration in private snapshots, magazines, the internet, art history and numerous other sources. He removes these images from the frenzied 21st-century visual flow and bestows on them the strange and special aura that seems perennially reserved for painting.

Autobiography and the history of his native Poland are recurring subjects in Sasnal’s work, as are broader questions about the pace and complexity of contemporary life. As the works on display reveal, the handling of paint also plays a central role. Variously dripped, finely brushed, thickly layered or even applied with his finger, Sasnal’s manipulation of the medium creates a dynamic interplay between figurative elements and areas that obstinately declare their painterly materiality.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

Jennifer Allora (born in Philadelphia, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born in Havana, Cuba)
met as art students in Florence, Italy and have been working together since 1995. They currently live and work in Puerto Rico, a country with a complex colonial history that informs their practice. Combining elements of sculpture, sound art, performance and video, their works employ metaphor to explore points of political or social tension – particularly those that relate to questions of statehood, freedom of expression and environmental issues. As Calzadilla has explained:

Metaphor can be a powerful tool when applied to the social area where meaning is consensually fixed. It can become a tangible force in reshaping how the world appears to us, thus opening new possibilities for subjective, individual, and communal identifications.