Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

new acquisition Photography
Robyn Stacey
Gorilla skull 2005
Type C colour photograph
100.0 x 162.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
60 national gallery of australia
Robyn Stacey Gorilla skull
Robyn Stacey belongs to a generation of photomedia
artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. These
artists were unconcerned with, even suspicious of, the
claims to truth by various styles of personal documentary
photography dominant in art museums in the 1970s. They
spurned reportage photography and embraced visual
culture as a source rather than the ‘real’ world. The artists
of this movement (later called Postmodernism) happily
appropriated images from the past as well as popular
culture, including the look of ‘old master’ paintings or
fifties and sixties magazines and television.
From her earliest series in the mid 1980s, Robyn Stacey
has created seductive and vibrantly coloured tableaux
involving great technical expertise in synthesising multiple
sources and motifs which has been greatly facilitated by
the emergence of digital manipulation. Her earliest efforts
are hand-coloured black-and-white prints; later works
involve complex overlays. Stacey’s series works, such as Kiss
kiss bang bang 1985 and All the sounds of fear 1990, were
grounded in popular culture with a slightly sixties Pop look,
but presented a modern world made somewhat anxious
and edgy. By contrast her work since the 1990s has made
use of science and the deathly quiet of a number of natural
history museum collections in which she worked during
several residencies.
Gorilla skull 2005 comes from Stacey’s Beau monde
series which draws on collections at the Macleay Museum,
Sydney, and recalls the tradition of the Dutch genre of
nature morte paintings in which the still-life objects provide
a moral lesson on the vanity of world. The reference to the
gorilla (a threatened species symbolising humankind) and
coral (a threatened wonder of Australia’s northern coast)
alongside dead specimens under the microscope and an
ominously placed geological hammer, combine to create
an anxiety often found in her early works. Stacey’s art
entertains and yet reminds us of dangers to the planet.
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Photography