Art Gallery of South Australia opens Rupert Bunny ~ Artist in Paris Exhibition

Written by Katherine Goody Sunday, 27 February 2011 00:53

ADELAIDE.- After enchanting audiences in Sydney and Melbourne, the sumptuous exhibition Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris arrives at its final destination, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Around a hundred lavishly beautiful works of art are on show from 23 July until 4 October, in celebration of Rupert Bunny (1864-1947), Australia’s most successful expatriate artist. Melbourne-born Rupert Bunny led a fascinating life and spent more than four decades living and working in France at the turn of last century.

Bunny painted imaginative tableaux which remain among the most loved pictures in Australian art galleries today. Included in this exhibition are his romantic mythological scenes, Impressionist visions of Parisian life and sensuous portrayals of beautiful women, as well as brightly-colored 20th century works inspired by the Fauves and French and Australian landscape paintings.

Bunny moved smoothly in Parisian artistic circles and became associated with some of the most celebrated artists of the day: Auguste Rodin, Claude Debussy, Sarah Bernhardt and fellow Australians Percy Grainger and Nellie Melba whose portraits by Bunny are in the exhibition.

By the end of his career, Bunny could claim to have more paintings in France’s national collections than any other Australian artist. Some of these works are traveling from France to appear for the first time in Australia as part of this exhibition. They will be reunited with works from across Bunny’s long career loaned from public and private collections across Australia, including Bunny’s masterpieces from the Art Gallery of South Australia’s own collection.

Rupert Bunny will be the subject of a symposium on Saturday 24 July organised by the Art Gallery of South Australia, where Bunny’s fascinating life and art will be explored in depth by expert curators and writers: Rebecca Capes-Baldwin, Denise Mimmocchi, Anne Gerard and David Thomas.

Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris is a traveling exhibition organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and curated by that gallery’s Curator of Australian Art, Deborah Edwards, assisted by Assistant Curator, Denise Mimmocchi. It is coordinated at the Art Gallery of South Australia by Rebecca Capes-Baldwin, Associate Curator of Australian Art.

Rupert Bunny (1864-1947)

Working for most of his life in Paris, Bunny formed an important tie between Australian painting and French Impressionism. His landscapes, figure studies, and scenes drawn from mythology and literature are full of light and subtle color harmonies, distinguished by their ability to capture a delicate intimacy of mood. Bunny’s celebrated depictions of women at leisure, which established his international reputation, were succeeded by lucent, textural landscapes after the development of the Impressionist movement. His later works, influenced by Gauguin and Orientalism, explored allegorical themes, imbuing images of modern life with an air of fantasy. The National Gallery of Victoria held retrospectives of Bunny’s paintings and drawings in 1946, and again in 1991, and his work was included in a number of survey exhibitions such as The Great Australian Art Exhibition, which toured the country 1988-89.

Visit the Art Gallery of South Australia at : http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home

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