Mix Tape 1980s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style will explore Australian art of the 1980s at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square opening on 11 April from 10am to 5pm, Tuesdays to Sundays.
Featuring over 120 works, the exhibition will bring together creative approaches ranging from appropriation and sampling to the DIY aesthetics of post-punk from postmodern critiques of authorship; and originality to postcolonial revisions of Australian history.
Tony Ellwood, NGV Director, said, “Mix Tape 1980s contextualises a decade that left a legacy beyond its memorable fashion and music.”
Mix Tape 1980s will feature various media—painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, fashion and furniture design, as well as selected ephemera including magazines, records, films and video which reference the preoccupations of a rapidly changing Australian society and the intersections between art, music, theory and popular culture.
Max Delany, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, NGV, said that “the 1980s was a period in which artists took up a diverse range of aesthetic positions not merely as stylistic options but as trenchantly argued ethical choices.”
Mix Tape 1980s will present key works including Howard Arkley’s Muzak mural - chair tableau (1980-1981) and Tattooed head (1988), Maria Kozic’s installation The Birds (1981), David McDiarmid’s Safe sex ball poster (1988), Tracey Moffatt’s Something More series (1989), Juan Davila’s Rat man (1980) and the work of women artists from Lajamanu who were critical to the genesis of the Indigenous women’s art movement.
Australian fashion of the 1980s will be highlighted through the works of Katie Pye Studio, Jenny Bannister, Leigh Bowery, Abyss Studio and others.
Rather than an encyclopedic view of Australian art of the period, the exhibition is a focused look at specific aspects of the NGV Collection in an area that remains a strength of the institution’s collecting history.
Entry to Mix Tape 1980s exhibition is free. For further details, visit www.ngv.vic.gov.au
