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‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul.’
This summer, as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2023-24, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Kandinsky, a major exhibition exploring the work of one of the most influential and best-loved European modernists, Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Featuring more than 50 works, the exhibition traces the full breadth of Kandinsky’s extraordinary artistic life, from his creative beginnings in Munich, to his return to his birthplace of Moscow with the outbreak of World War I, followed by the interwar years spent in Germany where he was an instructor at the Bauhaus, and his final experimental chapter in Paris. The largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever to be seen in Australia, Kandinsky has been curated with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which is home to one of the world’s most comprehensive Kandinsky holdings. Kandinsky will feature some of the artist’s most admired paintings, usually a highlight of the display at the iconic Guggenheim Museum. Exhibition highlights include his early career masterpiece Blue Mountain (1908-09); Painting with white border (1913), evocative of his beloved Moscow; the buoyant Dominant Curve (1936); and Composition 8 (1923), which Kandinsky regarded as the high point of his post-war achievement. Most of the works in this exhibition have never been seen in Australia before, making this a once in a lifetime experience, to be seen only in Sydney. Born from her hugely successful Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2021–22, Kandinsky is curated for Sydney by Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum, with Jackie Dunn, senior curator of exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Kandinsky is the next chapter in the Art Gallery’s deep engagement with European modern artists, begun in 1975 with the landmark Modern Masters exhibition. More recent inquiries into the key figures of modernism have included Monet and the Impressionists (2008-09), Picasso (2011), Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage (2018), Matisse: Life & Spirit (2021) and Kandinsky’s contemporary Hilma af Klint in The Secret Paintings (2021). Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand says the Art Gallery is excited to be staging this exhibition of one of the pioneers of European abstraction as part of the next edition of the Sydney International Art Series.
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