The Collection
The TarraWarra Museum of Art collection includes works by outstanding artists from 1950 onwards and acknowledges the earlier precursors of modernism. The collection explores the development of contemporary art over this period, highlighting differences, styles and movements, attempting to demonstrate that which distinguishes Australian modernism during the last half of the 20th Century.
In the 1950s and 1960s in Australia, those artists who had struggled for recognition during the 1940s began to be more widely appreciated. Concurrently, art students completed four-year diploma courses, migrant artists arrived and Australian artists travelled abroad. International modernism, dispelling parochial standards of evaluation, began to make a widespread impact, while landscape and figuration endured as subject matter.
From the late 1960s, the work of Australian artists reflects the influence of international movements (such as abstract expressionism, hard edge, pop art, photorealism, conceptual art, neo-expressionism, neo-classicism and postmodernism) together with Indigenous and Asian art. While containing examples of internationally informed art, the TarraWarra Museum of Art collection demonstrates a coherent and unique Australian character, strongly founded in this nation's interior and exterior world.