Gallery A Sydney
Campbelltown Arts Centre and Newcastle Art Gallery, 2009, with
accompanying publication.
Gallery A was a private gallery of contemporary art that fostered abstraction in painting and sculpture; it brokered the acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973. The exhibition represented two decades of the gallery’s life in Sydney through the work of artists including Ralph Balson, Janet Dawson, Rosalie Gascoigne, Frank Hinder, Robert Klippel and Milton Resnick.
“John Murphy’s scholarly account of Gallery A Sydney 1964–1983 raises a lot of questions … Murphy’s impressive curatorial hand and the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue go a long way to answering these questions. The exhibition itself was carefully structured, with the selection and disposition of works polemical rather than merely an attempt to represent ‘democratically’ the gallery’s history and artists.”
(David Pestorius, Art Monthly Australia, September 2009.)
Left to right: Robert Klippel, Metal sculpture No. 275, c.1974, Art Gallery of South Australia; Ralph Balson, Constructive painting, 1951, National Gallery of Australia; Robert Klippel, Metal sculpture No. 256, 1970, Newcastle Art Gallery.
Frank Hinder, Dark triptych, 1969, Art Gallery of South Australia.
Paintings from left to right, then sculptures: Murray Reich, Craven mix, 1970, private collection; John Seery, Arion, 1973, private collection; Natvar Bhavsar, Re noo, 1972, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery; Garry Rich, New York art dealer [Max Hutchinson, founder of Gallery A] 1979, private collection; Clement Meadmore, Upended, 1969, private collection; Clement Meadmore, Double up, 1970, Art Gallery of New South Wales.