MoMA at NGV:
130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art
NGV International
Roy Lichtenstein
American 1923–97
Drowning girl 1963
oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
171.6 x 169.5 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Philip Johnson Fund (by exchange) and gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright, 1971
© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2018
The National Gallery of Victoria, in partnership with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art as the 2018 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition. MoMA at NGV provides a unique survey of the Museum’s iconic collection. Consisting of over 200 key works, arranged chronologically into eight thematic sections, the exhibition traces the development of art and design from late-nineteenth-century urban and industrial transformation, through to the digital and global present.
The emergence of a ‘new art’ at the dawn of the twentieth-century is represented by some of MoMA’s earliest acquisitions, including masterworks by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. Works by pioneering Cubist and Futurist artists, including Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni, appear alongside the radically abstracted forms present in works by such artists as Lyubov’ Popova and Piet Mondrian, the surreal visual language of paintings by artists like Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo, and the spontaneity and tactility advanced in works by Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock, and other prominent Abstract Expressionist artists.
Developments in art beginning in the 1960s, from Pop through Minimalism, are explored with the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Lynda Benglis, and Sol LeWitt, among others. Significant works of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century art, including pieces by Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, Kara Walker, Rineke Dijkstra, Huang Yong Ping, El Anatsui and Camille Henrot, foreground ideas that inform much contemporary art, such as those around cultural and national identity, and mobility in a globalised world.
Throughout, these works of visual art are displayed alongside objects from MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection, many of which draw out concerns common to architects, designers and artists — creating a new visual language for the modern era. These include: a 1932 architectural model by Le Corbusier; graphic designs, furniture and textiles by artists involved in the influential workshops of the Bauhaus; Tomohiro Nishikado’s pioneering computer game Space Invaders (1978); and the original set of 176 emoji developed by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999.
Internationally exclusive to Melbourne, MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art is organised by Samantha Friedman (Associate Curator, Drawings and Prints, MoMA), Juliet Kinchin (Curator of Modern Design, MoMA), Christian Rattemeyer (The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA) and Miranda Wallace (Senior Curator, International Exhibition Projects, NGV).
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