SEEKING MARGARET PRESTON PAINTINGS AND DOCUMENTS


FOR A MAJOR TOURING EXHIBITION


ORGANISED BY THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is organising a major exhibition of one of Australia's most celebrated artists, Margaret Preston. The exhibition will open at  the Art Gallery of New South Wales in late July 2005, and will tour Australia.

The Margaret Preston exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph and a fully illustrated catalogue on CD ROM listing all of Margaret Preston's paintings.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is seeking to locate paintings, drawings, textiles and ceramic works by Margaret Preston as well as documents, letters or photographs relating to her.

Margaret Preston produced approximately 450 paintings in her lifetime, and the equivalent number of prints. She also engaged in craftwork, fabric design and pottery and illustrative work, and also produced a large number of influential articles from the 1920s dealing with her ideas for the development of a modern Australian art.

Margaret Preston (1875-1963), Australia's most celebrated early modernist, created exuberant innovative still lifes and images of the city through the 1920s and 30s, which have remained amongst the most popular of all Australian artists' work. She was also this country's first serious artist advocate of Aboriginal art. Her promotion, and her appropriation, of Aboriginal imagery and principles of design to the cause of modernism, particularly in paintings from the 1940s, has contributed to the ongoing significance, and the controversy, of her work.

Born in 1875, Margaret Preston had become a proficient painter by the 1890s and continued to painting into the 1950s, when aged in her late seventies. Many of these works, signed variously Rose Macpherson (or McPherson), M.R. MacPherson or Margaret Preston, are in private collections in Australia and overseas.

The curators of the exhibition, Deborah Edwards and Rose Peel from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, would like to make contact with people who own works by Margaret Preston, or have documents or photographs relating to her.

Deborah Edwards (02) 9225 1755 deborahe@ag.nsw.gov.au
Rose Peel (02) 9225 1773 rosep@ag.nsw.gov.au

... or by mail to Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney 2000

Media Information
Jan Batten
(02) 9225 1791 or 0418 279 348
janb@ag.nsw.gov.au

IMAGE: Margaret Preston Implement Blue 1960. Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales