Van Diemen's Land: Tasmanian Art in the UK

About

This summer, Celia Lendis Contemporary shows the work of eight leading Tasmanian artists: Raymond Arnold, Tim Burns, Barbie Kjar, John Lendis, Sue Lovegrove, Anne Morrison, Troy Ruffels and Martin Walch. For many of these artists, despite international recognition and having works in important collections across the globe, this will be their first exhibition of work in the UK. Located 250 kilometres south of Australia, Tasmania and its artistic community are relatively unknown to wider audiences across the UK and Europe regardless of their artistic achievements and quality. Perhaps it is this remoteness of place and the intense feeling of dislocation that this fosters or the visceral and ancient landscapes formed over millennia of cold winds blown in from the Antarctic, that has inspired and seduced many of Australia's leading artists. Tasmania acts as a magnet, drawing them, and others from across the globe, all to the edge of the world. This series of exhibitions and events highlights the serious academic connection between the emergent Tasmanian artists of the late 20th Century and their ancestral forbearers; re-imagining European artistic and painterly philosophies and applying these to the techniques and practices developed in the renowned Tasmanian School of Art.