In what might be the biggest blockbuster this decade, Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria’s world-exclusive exhibition of MoMA’s masterpieces – MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art opens next month. MoMA at NGV will feature a number of never-before-seen in Australia works in a showcase of the most innovative and influential artists of the last 130 years.
Running from June 8 to October 7, the exhibition is a monumental coup for the NGV. This is the biggest and most significant exhibition of masterworks to ever leave MoMA – New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Artists featured include a veritable who’s who of the nineteenth and twentieth-century artists to the present day. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keefe, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali will all be represented in the multi-disciplinary exhibition. The display will feature works from the Museum’s six curatorial departments: Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Film, Media and Performance Art, Painting and Sculpture and Photography.
A number of works by the most influential twenty-first-century artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson, El Anatsui and Camille Henrot brings the exhibition up to the present. Indeed, ‘MoMA at NGV’ explores major art movements over more than 130 years of revolutionary artistic innovation.
A masterstroke for the NGV and Director Tony Ellwood, this MoMA extravaganza will feature showstoppers such as Edward Hopper’s Gas, Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl as well as one of Salvador Dalí ’s most recognizable works The Persistence of Memory.
MoMA is considered one of the world’s most influential modern art museums and its 200,000 plus collection includes some of the world’s most important works from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to Henri Rousseau’s The Dream.
Other works include Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, Constantin Brancusi’s The Newborn and Toulouse Lautrec’s La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge.
Collections of this size and stature and rarely make their way to Australia. MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry said the museum’s mission “is to share our story of modern and contemporary art with the widest possible audience, to encourage the understanding and enjoyment of the art of our time”. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share these important works from nearly every area of our collection with the NGV and the many visitors who will take advantage of this rare opportunity.’ MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Moderna and Contemporary Art – June 8-October 17, 2018
NOTE: Featured Image: Installation view of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1950. Oil and enamel paint on canvas. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange). © 2012 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York