Burrinja Gallery Curent Exhibitions


Bill HENSON born Australia 1955 Untitled sequence 1977 from a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1981 1982.21	00000000000000000000000	Bill HENSON born Australia 1955 Untitled 1985–86 from a series of 154 chromogenic print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1988 1988.21

According to Dr Shaune Lakin, Director of MGA: "The exhibition includes some of Henson's most iconic works from the 1980s and 1990s and I'm delighted that visitors to Burrinja have the opportunity to see the works of this major Australian photographer from the MGA Collection".

Monash Gallery of Art holds one of the largest collections of photographs by Bill Henson in the country. With its concentration on work made between 1977 and 1992, the collection provides a significant survey of his early career. The 29 works in this exhibition are drawn from this collection, and Burrinja is looking forward to bringing this important exhibition to the Dandenong Ranges region in 2010.

Exhibition Essay
BILL HENSON: articulating experience
Local emerging artist, Clare Lynch, has written this insightful essay on Bill Henson and her response, as a young artists, to his work.
'I remember the first time I saw some of Henson’s work. I would have been fifteen or sixteen years old and starting my VCE...
As a young artist, I aim to give my opinion on Henson’s work and share some comments from critics and others over recent years.'

Bill HENSON born Australia 1955 Untitled 1977 from a series of 16 gelatin silver print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1981 1982.21	00000000000000000000000	Bill HENSON born Australia 1955 Untitled 1985–86 from a series of 154 chromogenic print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1988 1988.22

Henson prints his own work by hand, using chemicals and carefully chosen paper stock. The uneven surfaces of his early black-and-white works are a result of this wet process, and give the photographs a mysterious, almost alchemic quality. These material properties are not evident in reproductions of Henson’s images. The other aspect that is lost in reproduction is the physical difficulty of seeing Henson’s pictures clearly. The darkness appeals to Henson’s romantic sensibility, and he tends to let shadows obscure visual detail so that enigmas lurk at the threshold of perception. Publishers like to override this quality of Henson’s work by adjusting the contrast and brightness of the images for print. But viewers of this exhibition will find themselves drawn into an inscrutable visual space of shadows and deep, reflective blacks.