THE SOMETIMES CHAOTIC WORLDOF MIKE BROWN

This exhibition is an intimate, ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the prolific, boundary-breaking work of Mike Brown, from his early days with the collaborative artist group the Imitation Realists, known for their irreverent assemblage works of the 1960s, to the final years of his life in the mid 1990s.

Featuring over forty paintings and sculptures, the exhibition also includes archival material gifted and loaned to Heide by the artist’s family and his monographer Richard Haese, (author of Permanent Revolution, Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997). Brown’s little-known films from the 1970s, his colourful sketchbooks, notebooks and highly opinionated writings together with documentary photographs of and by the artist, give fresh insight into his world and the sources and inspirations of his art. Including some lesser known and more private works, a number of them owned by family, as well preparatory materials, like the stencils Brown used for his graffiti works, the exhibition seeks to give its audience a glimpse of the artist’s working processes.

Read how Mike Brown created a percussive soundscape in the early 1970s in this interview with curator Sue Cramer.