Melbourne Continues at the National Gallery of Victoria

One of the bridges along the Southbank Promenade

After Rob's post yesterday, he inspired me to try and keep the ball rolling with more footage from our 4 day trip to Melbourne. After PAX was finished and we were all geeked out, we decided to get some more variety of culture. The obvious choice was to visit the National Gallery of Victoria.  We walked along the Southbank Promenade from our hotel to the gallery, stopping for a coffee out of the back of a VW van. I can honestly say I have never done that before. This is definitely a Melbourne thing; they have a huge coffee reputation.We'd been told the NGoV was a fantastic gallery to visit and there happened to be a special exhibit on that I was particularly interested in. I will admit that it was probably more my thing than Rob's, but in the end even he found a few things in the exhibition that interested him.

Coffee from a converted van

The special exhibit was the Jean Paul Gaultier retrospective. Not only have I always had a particular love of his work, but the exhibition also made really great use of multimedia, movement, and dramatics. The curators' approach to the exhibition worked so well with Gaultiers' fashion philosophy; that clothes are designed for and come to life with the personality of a model. So rather than just have a bunch of outfits hanging on mannequins, the curator worked with Gaultiers' inspiration of movement. They used face-mapped mannequins that looked to be living, breathing, talking, smiling people, rotating mannequins, even a catwalk fashion show, and a vibrant variety of exhibition spaces that really pushed the concepts of his defferent collections and themes.

Gaultier has had (and still has) a prestigious career that's spanned so many eras of fashion, and something striking about his work is that it seems both current and yet timeless. He's done couture work, ready-wear fashion, film and everything in between. Remember "The Fifth Element", and all those iconic costumes? Gaultier! Outfits for Madonna, Beyonce and Lady Gaga? Gaultier! His fashion is structural, textural, and so full of beautiful, refined detail. I really enjoyed the series of pieces that were inspired by body tissue (skeleton, muscles, circulatory system), and this one dress that looked like a leopard skin until you noticed that the whole skin was actually a mosaic made out of beads. Oh, and the corsets were all amazing, made out of a very wide variety of materials, shapes and sizes. I really enjoyed the exhibit, and my respect for Gaultier's bold approach to thoughtful, exploratory design has grown so much as a result.

Blood, Muscle, Bones

I have no idea how many beads this took.... but I'll guess it was too many

Punk-inspired

I loved the texture of the knit on this one

While the photos are great, the video below shows just how much the movement really added life to the exhibition.



After making our way through the Gaultier exhibition, we moved on to the rest of the National Gallery's permanent collection. One nice thing about the National Gallery is that admission is completely free (aside from the special exhibits) and Rob and I agreed that free admission is key. If I lived in Melbourne, I would visit the gallery often. Also, their main collection was expansive, ranging from impressionist to aboriginal, classical to modern, industrial design to video installations. They had a little bit of everything, something for everyone to enjoy and be struck by. There were definitely a few stand-outs for Rob and I.

For Rob, there was a piece by his favourite artist of all time, Alfred Sisley, called Haystacks at Moret - Morning Light. I'm not a huge impressionism fan, but I did like this one. Rob ends up spending so much time sitting and looking at the colours and pointalist-style brush strokes, and I'm usually the one breezing by a bit.

I, however, spent more than a few minutes looking at this piece called October by an artist I had never heard of before, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Painted at the artist's native village of Damvillers (northeast of Paris), the painting represents the annual potato harvest in a bleak autumn landscape. Inspired by the examples of the better known Millet and Courbet (two of my favourite artists from this period), he set out to paint rural life as he knew it, celebrating the dignity of the peasants but also its hardships. For me, I was struck by how this huge painting felt so cinematic. The focus of the "camera", the contrast in colour... I was absolutely spellbound

The piece that took the cake, however, was called Anguish by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck (what a mouthful!). Schenck spent most of his career in France, specialising in painting landscapes and animal subjects, and it really shows in his attention to anatomical detail in this piece. For over 30 years he was a regular exhibitor at the Paric Salons, where Anguish was first shown in 1878. In Anguish, Schenck has given the sheep clearly recongisable human characteristics, such as determination and sorrow, so that the viewer immediately identifies with its predicament and emotions. Rob and I spent quite some time with this painting, loving at the little details, and the story being told through them.

Here are a few more images of pieces we liked, and also a video of our time in the gallery.

After the Gallery, Rob and I walked back to our hotel, stopping for lunch at one of the many restaurants along the Southbank Promenade. We got some lovely views of the city, ate our lunch, then hopped a cab to the airport to head back home to Sydney. Epic weekend, folks! And it was all topped off by a fantastic flight back to Sydney, landing with the sunset.

Lunch with Rob

At the botanical gardens