Artists Space Gallery was an Australian art gallery showing mainly photography, as well as other media, through the 1980s in Melbourne. [1]
The gallery was founded in 1978 [2] by Melbourne painter and photographer Wes Placek. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] He was joined in the early 80's by his partner Sophie Nowicka a textile designer and artist, [8] who assisted in administration of the gallery and in curatorial selection of exhibitions.
When it opened, the gallery occupied the top floor of a 1920s shopfront in the main street at 127 Buckley St., near the railway station in the working-class suburb Essendon. In 1987 the Gallery was relocated, closer to Melbourne CBD and amongst a growing number of other galleries. [9] Though it also showed other media, it was among contemporary specialist photography galleries The Photographers' Gallery, Brummels and Church Street that revived the medium as an art form. The new space, with four times the floor area, [10] was in a former warehouse in North Fitzroy at 150 Park Street on the corner of Best Street, opposite a linear park created from the Inner Circle Railway Line which had closed in 1981.
A range of exhibitions included emerging artists and those well recognised nationally and internationally. [11] While located in Essendon, in the opinion of The Age newspaper art reviewer Beatrice Faust, Placek's exhibitions "accumulated a lot of critical capital," as it "showed small collections of consistently good and sometimes excellent work," [10] including Robert Mapplethorpe's 1983 photogravure suite 'Flowers', and also Bettina Rheims. [12] [13] [14] However, in her 1987 review, just after the relocation, Faust feared the extra space would affect the quality of the work shown, [10] though favourable reviews continued. [15] [16] [17] [18]
It signifies the impact of the Gallery, that founder Placek was himself included, among many of the past exhibitors at Artists Space, in the landmark survey show [19] and publication [20] of photography of the 1970s and 1980s, The Thousand Mile Stare.
Artists Space Gallery closed in 1990.
The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum.
Bettina Caroline Germaine Rheims is a French photographer.
The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), in Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria, is a venue for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based arts, providing a context for the enjoyment, education, understanding and appraisal of contemporary practice.
Photography Studies College, commonly abbreviated to PSC, is a privately owned independent tertiary photography college established in 1973, located in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
David Moore was an Australian photojournalist, historian of Australian photography, and initiator of the Australian Centre for Photography.
Carol Jerrems was an Australian photographer/filmmaker whose work emerged just as her medium was beginning to regain the acceptance as an art form that it had in the Pictorial era, and in which she newly synthesizes complicity performed, documentary and autobiographical image-making of the human subject, as exemplified in her Vale Street.
Christine Abrahams Gallery, first named Axiom, was a Melbourne gallery showing contemporary Australian art between 1980 and 2008.
Susan Fereday is an Australian artist, writer, curator and educator. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia.
Joyce Olga Evans, B.A., Dip. Soc. Stud. was an Australian photographer active as an amateur from the 1950s and professional photographic artist from the 1980s, director of the Church Street Photography Centre in Melbourne (1976–1982), art curator and collector, and tertiary photography lecturer.
Reynolds Mark Ellis was an Australian social and social documentary photographer. He also worked, at various stages of his life, as an advertising copywriter, seaman, lecturer, television presenter and founder of Brummels Gallery of Photography, Australia's first dedicated photography gallery, where he established both a photographic studio and an agency dedicated to his work, published 17 photographic books, and held numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas.
Anne Ferran is an Australian photographer.
Brummels Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia, was a commercial gallery established by David Yencken in 1956 to exhibit contemporary Modernist Australian painting, sculpture and prints, but after a period of dormancy became best known in the 1970s, under the directorship of Rennie Ellis, as the first in Australia to specialise in photography at a time when the medium was being revived as an art form. The gallery closed in 1980.
The Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) was a not-for-profit photography gallery in Darlinghurst, Sydney, Australia that was established in 1973 and which also provided part-time courses and community programs.
Pinacotheca was a gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Established in 1967 by Bruce Pollard, it was ideologically committed to the avant-garde and represented a new generation of artists interested in post-object, conceptual and other non-traditional art forms.
The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop (1973–2010) was an Australian photography gallery established in South Yarra, Melbourne, and which ran almost continuously for nearly 40 years. Its representation, in the 1970s and 1980s, of contemporary and mid-century, mostly American and some European original fine prints from major artists was influential on Australian audiences and practitioners, while a selection of the latter's work sympathetic to the gallery ethos was shown alternately and then dominated the program.
Robert Ashton (1950) is an Australian photographer and photojournalist.
Jacqueline Mitelman is an Australian portrait photographer.
Philip Quirk is an Australian photographer, photojournalist and educationist, known for his specialist imagery of landscape, geographic and documentary photography, and as a founding member of the Wildlight agency.
eX De Medici is an Australian artist, whose works include Installation art, painting, photography, and drawing. Her works often deal with concepts of power and violence, and recurring motifs include skulls, helmets, guns and the swastika symbol. She has exhibited widely across Australia and is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra Museum and Gallery, Australian state galleries and in private collections. de Medici was an Artist Fellow at the CSIRO for more than a decade, was awarded a print making fellowship in 2006, and was an official war artist for The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands. She will be a featured artist in the NGA's major exhibition in 2020-2021, Know My Name, that will feature Australian women artists 1900 to today.
Rozalind Drummond is a photographic artist and an early exponent of postmodernism in Australia.
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