Devonport Regional Gallery: Play On: The Art of Sport …

IMAGE CREDIT: Richard Lewer The theatre of sports 2016, oil on canvas, 12 parts each 70 x 70 cm. Photography: Andrew Curtis, Courtesy of the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. Collection of Basil Sellers AM.

Play On: The Art of Sport – 10 years of the Basil Sellers Art Prize coming to Devonport

Play On: The Art of Sport – a NETS Victoria and Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, touring exhibition – will open at the Devonport Regional Gallery next week.

The exhibition, which brings together 10 years of contemporary art commissions on the subject of sport and sporting culture, will open on Saturday 7 July and runs until Sunday 19 August.

It is touring nationally until 2019 with Devonport the only scheduled Tasmanian stop.

Play On: The art of sport celebrates 10 years of the Basil Sellers Art Prize, the prestigious and distinctively Australian biennial exhibition that reflects upon one of our great national obsessions – sport.

Featuring the winners and other key works from all five instalments of the Prize, the exhibition brings together diverse explorations of the personal and collective significance of sport and sporting culture from some of Australia’s most accomplished artists.

NETS Victoria Director Mardi Nowak said: “NETS Victoria is thrilled to partner with Ian Potter Museum of Art to tour this exhibition. Sport cuts across society like few pursuits. We expect the exhibition will really connect with regional audiences and give communities an opportunity to see some of Australia’s most exciting, leading and emerging Australian artists.”

Play On: The art of sport encompasses a dynamic range of media including painting, sculpture, video, drawing and mixed-media installation with works that respond to an equally extensive range of sporting genres, including community footy, women’s boxing, ground-keeping, gymnastics and AFL.

They portray the sports arena as a powerful theatre of emotion, where hope, fear, adversity, triumph, glory and defeat are writ large. Even more strikingly though, sport is used as a lens through which to contemplate a number of society’s most cogent issues: from mechanisms of cultural belonging and marginalisation, gender and race relations, to technology’s impact on our physical limits.

The exhibition is curated by Jacqueline Doughty, Samantha Comte and Alyce Neal.

TWILIGHT TALK AND IN-CONVERSATION
16 August 2018, 5.30 p.m. Free event
Join Alyce Neal, co-curator of the exhibition Play On: the art of sport for an overview of 10
years of the Basil Sellers Art Prize. Exhibiting artist and two-time finalist of the Prize, Fiona
McMonagle will then join Alyce for an in-conversation to discuss boxing, watercolours and
her career to date.

ARTISTS APPEARING
Tony Albert, Richard Bell, Lauren Brincat, Jon Campbell, Daniel Crooks, Gabrielle de Vietri,
Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Shaun Gladwell, Josie Kunoth Petyarre, Dinni Kunoth
Kemarre Richard Lewer, Fiona McMonagle, Kerrie Poliness, Khaled Sabsabi and Gerry Wedd.
Devonport Regional Gallery