MCA Australia presents Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface

Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), from 15 July to 25 September 2022. Surveying 60 years of work by one of Australia’s most significant living painters, Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface is the first retrospective dedicated to the artist.

Curated by Anneke Jaspers (Senior Curator, Collection, MCA) and Hannah Mathews (Senior Curator, MUMA), this major survey exhibition brings together over one hundred artworks on loan from public and private collections and from the artist’s collection. The MCA presentation developed by Youssofzay + Hart architects will expand on the exhibition in its first iteration at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) with a new artwork-in-progress by the artist, and an exclusive display of archival material relating to Binns’ community-based projects. There will also be a new film commissioned by the MCA that offers insights into Binns’ studio and artistic process.

Speaking about Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface and the associated monograph, the American feminist art historian, curator and writer Lucy R. Lippard, has said, “It’s hard to overestimate Vivienne Binns’ contributions to Australian art, and to feminism through her long and generous career as an artist in the “high art” and the community arts contexts. Few have managed to be so outstanding in both fields. The variety is staggering, and the joy is ubiquitous.”

According to MCA curator, Anneke Jaspers, “Vivienne Binns has been at the forefront of progressive art practice in Australia for many years. The MCA exhibition celebrates all facets of Binns’ contribution to contemporary art, from her early, iconic depictions of the body – which anticipated the feminist art movement – to her meditations on Australia’s place in the Pacific. It highlights Binns’ significant artist-in-community projects and gives MCA visitors a rich insight into her creative process.”

Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface at the MCA traces the collaborative and community projects that spanned two decades of Binns’s early career. During the 1970s and 1980s, Binns turned away from the formal institutions of art and produced a series of celebrated artist-in-community projects. Centered around feminist processes of collectivity and collaboration, these works were focused on elevating the stories and experiences of women and encouraging public participation in the arts. Lippard has described these radical undertakings as ‘intricately structural’ efforts to bridge the domain of art with social relations.

These pivotal works will be explored through an exclusive display of archival materials and documentation, which has been jointly devised with the artist and architects Youssofzay + Hart. This section of the exhibition will include photographs, posters, media clippings, printed ephemera and videos; surviving artworks related to Binns’ enameling practice; and her major collaborative installation Tower of Babel, 1989-ongoing.

Among the highlights in the exhibition is Binns’ current work-in-progress Painting without title 2022, 2019 – ongoing, exhibited for the first time. This is Binns’ latest work which she may continue to modify when it returns to her studio. By Binns’ measure, the canvas has ‘none of the intensity and intellectual concerns of the earlier paintings’. Instead, the subtlety and precision of different marks come to the fore. The mass of circles and interconnecting lines that dominate the composition may allude to maps of urban rail networks or/and the body at the level of jostling blood cells and firing synapses. However, for Binns the work is ‘not about those things. The meaning comes from somewhere in between the references.’

Another highlight is Binns’ early works that reflect her involvement in the 1960s women’s movement, defined by powerful images of sexual and psychological inquiry. Several paintings from her first solo exhibition in 1967 are now recognised as iconic proto-feminist works, alongside the contemporaneous ‘central core’ imagery of artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

Also presented will be The aftermath and the ikon of fear, 1984–85, which was recently co-acquired by the MCA with Tate, London. The body of work to which this canvas belongs emerged out of intense psychological probing by Binns into both the spectre of her earlier sexual imagery and the ‘dam of knowledge’ accrued from her time working in the field, posing a vivid counterpoint to the ascendant post-pop aesthetic of the era.

There will be a focus on Binns 1990s practice looking at what it means to be situated as an artist in Australia’s settler colonial context on the Pacific rim. Binns’ output during this period was partly inspired by travel to London, Japan, Cook Islands, Samoa and the Kimberley with a view to deepening her knowledge about the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region, its interwoven cultural ineages, and her own identity.

The MCA will present an in-depth look into Binns creative process via a new film shot in the artist’s studio. In this film Binns elaborates on the many ‘aids to manufacture’ she has used to achieve her virtuosic painterly effects – from unusual brushes to stencils, rollers and combs, many of which she has fashioned herself.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph on Vivienne Binns. Co-published by MCA Australia, MUMA and the University of Sydney imprint Powered by Power, this major publication is designed by the award-winning Melbourne team Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen,and brings

together new scholarship on Binns’s practice alongside an interview with the artist, plates section,extended biography and illustrated list of works. The publication is available for order here.

Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface is a partnership between the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney and Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne. The exhibition at the MCA will be presented in an expanded form from July 15 to September 25, 2022. Entry is free

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Charlotte Greig, MCA PR Manager
E: Charlotte.Greig@mca.com.au | M: +61 404 111 919 | T: +61 2 9245 2417

About the Artist

Vivienne Binns OAM is known primarily for her process-based painting practice, though she has also worked extensively across enamel, performance, installation, and as an artist-in-community. Binns rose to prominence in the 1960s with her psychedelic depictions of sexual imagery, which marked a turning point in the history of proto-feminist art. She was a key figure in the Women’s Art Movement (WAM), notably participating in the establishment of the Woman’s Art Register. Binns is also credited with developing community arts in Australia, following a series of landmark collaborative projects in the 1970s and 1980s that aimed to increase public engagement with the field of creativity. Over the last 30 years, Binns has focused on her painting practice, addressing subjects including colonial explorations in the Asia-Pacific and Australia’s cultural connections to the region, as well as formal concerns relating to pattern and surface treatment, which invoke a range of art historical lineages.

In 1983 Binns received the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for her service to art, craft and community. In 2021, she was honoured by the Australia Council with a Visual Arts Award for lifetime achievement. Vivienne Binns is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

About Youssofzay + Hart Architects

Youssofzay + Hart is a young Sydney-based architecture practice run by directors Belqis Youssofzay and David Hart. The practice specialises in exhibitions and interiors for cultural institutions and also works on private residences, public housing, and site-responsive installations. Youssofzay + Hart derives its design ethos from sensitivity to the environment and a close reading of context. Concerns of lived experience, materiality and a sustainable future are the grounding principles of the studio. At the core of each project is the belief that all design should contribute towards better cities, suburbs and public spaces.

About the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA)

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) is Australia’s leading contemporary art museum dedicated to exhibiting, collecting, and interpreting the work of living artists. The MCA is located on one of the world’s most spectacular sites on the edge of Sydney Harbour at Tallawoladah, on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. The Museum presents exhibitions and learning programs that engage a broad and diverse public. The MCA Collection contains over 4500 works with a sustained commitment to works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists.

MCA Australia presents Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface added by akash upadhyay on July 16, 2022
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