Located in the heart of Victoria’s south-west is Hamilton, a thriving regional centre built on generations of farming and a renowned wool industry. It’s a stone’s throw to the Grampians National Park, and even closer to Victoria’s most recently active volcano, Mount Napier. Now, the city is also hosting what is described as one of the most ambitious regional exhibitions, Emerging From Darkness: Faith, Emotion and The Body in the Baroque, at Hamilton Gallery.
Emerging From Darkness presents over 70 rare and world-renowned Baroque masterpieces thanks to a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), with loans from the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) and private lenders. Such include Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia (c.1625), never before exhibited in Australia, or even known to be in the country; the NGV’s 2022 acquisition, Mystic marriage of Saint Catherine (1574-1577) by Lavinia Fontana, widely regarded as the first woman to become a professional painter in Europe; and Peter Paul Rubens’ Self-portrait (1623), a prized and rarely loaned work from the NGA.
