21st Century HeideThe Collection Since 2000
Free with Museum Pass
Free entry
Over 1500 artworks have been acquired by Heide since the turn of the century, from rare collages by Sidney Nolan produced in the 1930s to a monumental installation by contemporary artist Kathy Temin. Becoming part of the museum’s collection largely through gift, bequest and donated funds, they demonstrate the generosity of donors and a positive response to Heide’s integration of modernist and contemporary art. Some acquisitions have entered the collection in response to recent Heide exhibitions, while others have been inspired by Heide’s history and environment, as well as its renewed contemporary focus, including Siri Hayes’s and Kim Donaldson’s works, a site-specific painting by Mirka Mora and Callum Morton’s sculpture One to One.
While works from the collection are regularly shown in changing exhibitions in Heide I and Heide II, 21st Century Heide offers an opportunity across the entire Heide site to display a wider range of contemporary art, the focus of today’s collecting as it was in the time of the museum’s founders, John and Sunday Reed.
Showing across all three Heide buildings, contemporary art drawn from the collection reveals the material and conceptual diversity that characterises artists’ practice today. This is evident in grouped displays in Heide III, for example, which vary in genre, style and tone. One room focuses on the nature of visual perception, while one room-sized installation is directed towards the viewer’s physical experience. Figurative and expressionist works sit alongside cooler meditations on modernist traditions. Heide’s increasing collection of photographs, a medium not collected in early years, acknowledges the importance of photography to contemporary art, as seen in works by Micky Allen, Daniel Crook, Siri Hayes, Jacky Redgate and David Thomas.
Abstraction features in the Heide II display of paintings and prints from the 1960s to today, in modes that vary from the minimal to the exuberant, the flat and decorative to the materially dense. A changing display of key donations, including the remarkable Family Group (c.1946) by Arthur Boyd and Tremor (2000) by Rosslyn Piggott, is on display upstairs.
Heide I is invigorated by several large contemporary sculptures, creating an element of surprise that visitors in the early years would have experienced when seeing new art in the Reeds’ home. Heide’s growing collection of Murrumbeena pottery, recently boosted by a significant donation, is presented in the kitchen.