Vivienne Binns. On and through the Surface

February 5–September 25, 2022

Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne
February 5–April 14, 2022

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
July 15–September 25, 2022

Vivienne Binns
On and through the Surface

Vivienne Binns is one of Australia’s most significant living artists. Since the 1960s, she has played an important role in the evolution of feminist, collaborative, community and studio practices. Her ground-breaking work has tested the philosophical underpinnings of art itself while also pre-empting and participating in some of the most vital cultural discourses of its times—from women’s social and sexual liberation to the nuances of regional identity.

Curated by Hannah Mathews (Senior Curator, MUMA) and Anneke Jaspers (Senior Curator, Collection, MCA), the exhibition is the first retrospective dedicated to the work of Binns. It brings together over one hundred artworks drawn from six decades of the artist’s practice, on loan from public and private collections and from the artist’s collection.

Binns’s early career was 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.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Binns turned away from the formal institutions of art and produced a series of celebrated artist-in-community projects. Centred around feminist processes of collectivity and collaboration, the art historian Lucy Lippard acknowledged these radical undertakings as ‘intricately structural’ efforts to bridge the domain of art with social relations. At the MCA, these pivotal works will be explored through an extensive display of archival materials and documentation.

After a hiatus of nearly two decades, Binns subsequently returned to the studio. Among the many highlights in the exhibition is her key painting from this period, 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.

Since the 1990s, Binns has focused her practice on questions of art’s relationship to daily life and what it means to be situated as an artist in Australia’s settler colonial context on the Pacific rim. These investigations are especially visible in Binns’s use of patterning and surface treatments, which connect Western art histories with domestic or familiar imagery, as well as references to material cultures of the Asia–Pacific.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph on Vivienne Binns. Co-published by MUMA, MCA 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 pre-order here.

Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface will be followed by a year-long program at MUMA of exhibitions, commissions, publishing and events that consider how the keystones of Binns’s practice resonate, endure and are challenged in the work of a range of contemporary artists and thinkers. This new approach to programming anchors MUMA’s commitment to an in-depth engagement with the career and biography of a significant senior artist.

Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface is a partnership between Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney. The exhibition opened at MUMA on February 5 where it continues until April 14, 2022 and will be presented at the MCA in an expanded form from July 15 to September 25, 2022.

Vivienne Binns is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.