What's on - Titled / Untitled: Works from The Gordon Collection

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Bill Bachman / George Baldessin / Sydney Ball / David Beaumont / Donald Cameron / Patricia Carter / Arch Cuthbertson / Lani Dafter / Lesley Dumbrell / Lindsay Edward / Donna Goonan / Murray Griffin / Phil Hayes / Roger Kemp / David Larwill / Alun Leach-Jones / Bruno Leti / Diane Mantzaris / Kenneth Paul / Bundit Puangthong / Jeff Raglus / Jan Senbergs / Bevan Shepherd / Dr Ernest (Walter) Smith / Richard Szymczuk / David Turner / Penny Tweedie / Andy Warhol

Titled / Untitled – Works from The Gordon Collection is the first in a series of exhibitions celebrating The Gordon’s 125 year history as an icon in the Geelong community. Yet while The Gordon celebrates its 125th anniversary, the art collection is only 35 years young.

Curated by Anna Briers, Titled / Untitled showcases highlights from The Gordon collection. It reveals the dynamic tensions between opposing forces that arise out of a diverse and sometimes incongruent collecting process. It reflects a complexity of reference points, artistic concerns and subject matter.
Bound up in the notion of ‘title’ is the inference of identity and this exhibition includes numerous works that explore its variables and permutations. These include the personal and collective, the urban and regional, the deviant and experimental, the cultural, sub cultural and cross-cultural and within this, the notion of identity as a constant site of negotiation. The term ‘title’ also lends itself to allusions of land and title and therefore raises questions around claim, inheritance, custodianship and ownership.

Under the banner of Untitled, this exhibition also includes works by influential non objective painters such as Alun Leach-Jones and Sydney Ball who irrevocably changed the direction of Australian painting in 1960s. With their departure from expressive landscapes and bush legends, they were major proponents of a new kind of Australian abstraction influenced by post war American painting. In work by David Turner, we are able to see this movement play out in the context of Geelong.