UNSW Galleries Spring season exhibitions now open

People Like Us and Streets of Papunya: 5 September – 7 November

John Fries Award: 5 September –10 October

UNSW Art & Design is pleased to announce its most ambitious exhibition season yet featuring a dynamic line-up of established and emerging, international and Australian artists.

The spring series unveils three new exhibitions in the recently launched UNSW Galleries in Paddington. Together they encompass a broad range of media and themes in the work of major artists from Australia and abroad through three significant exhibitions: People Like Us, Streets of Papunya and the John Fries Award.

The largest of the three exhibitions, People Like Us, explores the interrelationship between art, technology and the human experience. The exhibition considers the capacity that new media and technologies offer humans to experiment with ideas and interpret information in the 21st century. The works use moving image, interactive digital technologies, data visualisation, sound and music to explore connections between our inner selves, each other and our environments. The exhibition features mostly new works by 12 Australian and international artists including Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Angelica Mesiti, Michael Nyman, Su-Mei Tse and Jason Wing.

Curated by UNSW Galleries Director Felicity Fenner, People Like Us is a National Exhibitions Touring Support (NETS) Australia exhibition developed by UNSW Galleries. It will tour to more than ten art gallery and museum venues nationally from 2016–2019.*

Simultaneously on display, Streets of Papunya reveals new works by the remarkable women painters of contemporary Papunya, rising stars of the town’s new Papunya Tjupi Art Centre established in 2007. It shows their work in its contemporary sociological and historical contexts, alongside short films that explore the reality of life in Papunya, and the famous paintings of the current generation’s ancestors. The exhibition includes work by some of the first women painters in the desert, who joined the original Papunya art movement in the early 1980s, and by the daughters of many of the ground-breaking Papunya Tula artists of the 1970s.

Following UNSW Galleries Streets of Papunya will tour to university art museums in Canberra, Adelaide and Melbourne.

The suite of spring exhibitions at UNSW Galleries is completed by the 6th annual John Fries Award exhibition, which carries a $10,000 prize for the winner. The John Fries Award presents new and experimental works by emerging Australian and New Zealand artists. The Award which has quickly developed a national profile, was established by the Fries family in memory of former Viscopy director and honorary director John Fries, and is this year curated by Oliver Watts.

*The National Touring Initiative is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Admission to UNSW Galleries is free.

Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am -5pm