Photography: Brett Boardman
This exhibition traces lineages between art and place across time and media, celebrating new and heritage public art.
Artworks by five leading Australian artists have been commissioned and are installed across the precinct from the northern entrance on Hunter Street, across the 1 Elizabeth ground floor spaces, in the underground pedestrian link ‘Muru Giligu’, and through to the southern entrance.
This collection of new public art complements and interacts with heritage artworks from the site. Sixty years ago, three major art commissions were installed in the Australian headquarters of the P&O shipping line that once stood on this site. Today, with the opening of the new metro train line and Macquarie headquarters above, those sculptural installations have been restored and reinstalled alongside major new artworks by some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
The exhibition explores how 1 Elizabeth’s new artworks respond materially and conceptually to the history of the site and to the heritage sculptures whose space they now share. The original artists in the early 1960s embraced geological, cultural and mythological aspects in their site-specific works, inherent to bodies of water and ocean travel. The contemporary pieces similarly reference themes of fluidity and circular flows, while also evoking the movement of people through and across the precinct, and of the metro trains that go around and around deep below the surface.
The Macquarie Group Collection has been supporting emerging Australian artists for more than thirty-five years. The Collection's annual Emerging Artist Prize offers support to a new generation of Australian visual artists by inviting them to enter one original work that reflects the Collection’s theme, The Land and Its Psyche.
