Curious Affection by Patricia Piccinini
In her most ambitious exhibition to date, globally renowned artist Patricia Piccinini will occupy GOMA’s entire ground floor, including the Children’s Art Centre, with a retrospective of her key works and a suite of daring new commissions conceived for the Gallery’s expansive spaces. Known for her imaginative hybrid creatures, Piccinini uses sculpture, installation, video, and sound to realise a fantastic and compassionate vision inspired by science, Surrealism and mythology. This will be GOMA’s largest ever solo exhibition by an Australian artist.
"Piccinini explores the interrelationship of humanity and the natural world, and the social and moral impact of scientific research, genetics and biotechnology on people, animals and our planet," said Chris Saines, director of Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).
The exhibition will run until 5 August 2018 and will feature some of Piccinini’s most recognisable life-like sculptures, among them The Bond 2016, a woman lovingly cradling an ambiguous creature, along with Big Mother 2005, The Comforter 2010, and The Carrier 2012. It will include a large-scale, newly commissioned inflatable sculpture suspended in GOMA’s atrium – a continuation of ideas the artist explored in the controversial hot air balloon work titled The Skywhale, a commission that marked the Centenary of Canberra in 2013.
San Francisco.
About the artist
Patricia Piccinini was born in Sierra Leone in 1965 and grew up in Australia. The Melbourne-based artist represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 with We Are Family, an exhibition that also toured to Tokyo and Bendigo. Her other solo museum surveys have included ComCiência, CCBB Sao Paulo in 2015, touring to CCBB Brasilia, CCBB Rio de Janeiro, and CCBB Belo Horizonte in 2016; Relativity, Galway International Art Festival (2015); Hold Me Close To Your Heart, Arter Space For Art, Istanbul (2011); Once Upon a Time, Art Gallery of South Australia (2011); Relativity, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2010); Evolution at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2009); (tiernas) Criaturas/(tender) Creatures at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain, 2007); Hug: Recent Works by Patricia Piccinini, Frye Museum, Seattle, and Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines (USA, 2007); In Another Life, Wellington City Gallery, Wellington (NZ, 2006); Call of the Wild, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002); and Retrospectology, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2002).
Piccinini’s work has also been featured in Queensize at Me, Berlin (2015), Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013), Medicine and Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009), The 2nd Asian Art Biennale, Taipei (2009), Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007), Uneasy Nature, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, USA (2006), Becoming Animal, MASS MoCA, USA (2005), Bienal de La Habana, Cuba (2003) Face Up, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003), Sydney Biennale (2002), Liverpool Biennale (2002) Berlin Biennale (2001) and Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2000).
In 2014 Piccinini was awarded the Melbourne Art Foundation Visual Arts Award and in 2016 she received a Doctor of Visual and Performing Arts (Honora Causa) from the Victorian College of the Arts.
