MONA presents The Museum of Everything #7 2017
10th June 2017 – 2nd April 2018
The Museum of Everything is proud to announce its most expansive and ambitious show to date at Mona (Museum of Old and New Art): the groundbreaking Tasmanian institution dedicated to new definitions of historic and contemporary art.
With over 100 artists and almost 2,000 artworks – ranging from 1800 to the present day – the high-profile production will be the largest international exhibition of non-academic art ever staged in Australia, New Zealand or wider Australasia.
The innovative layout, which captures the feel of a discovered home-museum, has been designed and themed by The Museum of Everything in conjunction with award-winning movie production designer Eve Stewart, and Mona’s team of artists, artisans, designers and fabricators. Within this new riverfront home, the project juxtaposes paintings, drawings, sculpture and objects, creating a vivid journey through an alternative art history and into matters both of life and death.
Legends of what the artist Jean Dubuffet defined as art brut are on display such as the early drawings and letters by Swiss polymath Adolf Wölfli, the anonymous stone carvings known as Les Barbus Müller collected by Tristan Tzara and André Breton, and faked flint-stone proofs of Neanderthal art, peddled by Polish nobleman, Juva.
The Museum of Everything sees art-making as inherent human behaviour. Hence the abstracted spirit drawings of two pioneering female artists – Sweden’s Hilma af Klint and Britain’s Georgiana Houghton – whose 19th century mark-making anticipated 20th century modernism. Their beliefs are mirrored by later activators, like the futurist cathedrals of Parisian road-worker Marcel Storr, or the monumental Last Supper of Perth electrician, Stan Hopewell.
Text above is from the press release, for further information on the exhibition visit The Museum of Everything and MONA.
For a review of The Museum of Everything #7 at MONA visit The Guardian’s The private life of art: The Museum of Everything by Brigid Delaney.