Artbank - CBRE by artbank.gov.au

Introduction to Artbank

The Artbank collection was founded with an endowment of 600 artworks from the National Collection (now the National Gallery of Australia) and has since grown to include more than 10,000 works spanning media including painting, sculpture, video and photography. Through leasing works to individuals, companies and governments, Artbank lives up to its policy principle of promoting broad access to Australian contemporary art. Through our leasing of artworks to Australian embassies and overseas posts, we provide access to Australian contemporary art in approximately 70 countries across the globe.

Artbank has similarities with other collecting institutions in how we undertake aspects of the business, but we are very different in both why we collect artwork and how we promote Australian art to stakeholders, clients and the public. For the broader community, we make Australian contemporary art accessible in ways other collecting institutions cannot. With Artbank artworks in workplaces and other public and private places around Australia and the world, we enable the broader community to access some of the best examples of Australian contemporary art.

This allows for a different, more everyday type of engagement with artworks than a gallery or museum exhibition offers. By displaying works in offices, government buildings and homes, we present artworks to many who would never visit a public or private gallery, breaking down traditional barriers to this art form.

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Artbank Sydney, photo Tom Ferguson

Artbank is a unique Government artist support and access initiative. For over 40 years we have supported thousands of Australian artists, building an impressive collection of over 11,000 artworks. Artbank artworks enrich government, business and residential spaces, exposing a wide variety of people to contemporary Australian art.

Director’s Message Artbank is delighted to bring a refreshed selection of works to the walls of our clients. As we enter our fifth decade, we are determined to continue managing this unique government program that supports contemporary Australian artists through acquiring their works and making them available in office and residential spaces. We hope these works will help to enliven the workplace and serve as a reminder of the immense diversity and talent of Australia’s contemporary visual artists. We hope that they will spark conversations, stimulate creativity and build morale.

Artbank Sydney, photo Tom Ferguson

Zoë Rodriguez Director, Artbank

Tom POLO I BEG YOUR DOLLY PARTON, 2011 Painting Synthetic polymer paint on board #13005

Tom Polo has long been fascinated with language. His works in painting, sculpture and photography have explored language in colloquial contexts, through puns and word play, and through the affirmations used to build confidence, or conversely, to portray doubt and uncertainty. 'I BEG YOUR DOLLY PARTON' 2011 is executed in ways that underscore and accentuate its multiple meanings. In this work, the words are executed in acrylic paint in upper case on five wooden boards, a word to each segment of the final piece, the rendering of the text thus suggesting a shout or a proclamation, yet when placed on boards, also reminiscent of protest banners. Polo's conceptual interest in the vagaries and ambiguities of language present the viewer with an immediately decodable message, yet reserve a degree of ambiguity that over time renders the works far more abstract and mysterious.

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Kiron ROBINSON Used Hours/Wasted Hours, Series. March (Deep Sky Blue), April (Field Green), May (Tangerine), June (Peach), July (Strawberry Cream), August (Plum), 2011

Kiron Robinson works across a variety of media including photography, neon, installation, video and printmaking. His subject is the expression of doubt and failure and his work explores ways of depicting his shifting emotional states through markers of his progress. His print series 'Used Hours/Wasted Hours' literally accounts for the hours the artist has wasted or used productively month by month over a fourteen month period. It is connected to a tradition in conceptual art for serial and endurance based works. Although it would seem that the wasted hours outnumber those used, the act of recording is in itself productive. This is the paradox at the core of Robinson’s work.

Print Relief, silk cut #13173

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Gerwyn DAVIES Milk, 2013 Photography Digital print #13755

Inspired by fashion and the performance of identity, Brisbane born photographer Gerwyn Davies (b. 1985) critically engages with the function of the dressed body as an articulation of the self. Using readymade and everyday materials, Gerwyn Davies assembles characters through costume that simultaneously conceal, transform and abstract the body. These highly stylised and exaggerated transformations are regenerative as they form part of an ongoing inventory of photographic self-projections. 'Milk' is a work from Davies's 'Beast' series in which, with characteristic flair and subversive humour, he reinvents everyday materials as offbeat, highly stylised fashion attire. Milk itself is evocative of many things from childhood and motherhood to the 1950s diner and other cultural histories of milk.

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Brad RIMMER Allana’s Place, Wyalkatchem Autumn, 2015 Photography Colour photograph #14216

Brad Rimmer (b. 1962) is a Western Australian based photographer who is inspired by the unglamorous reality of life on the land and the ways in which we collect and create memories. 'Allana’s Place, Wyalkatchem Autumn' is from a well known series of images ‘Nature Boy’, taken while revisiting the areas of the wheatbelt in which he grew up, and the tragedy of loss in a small community. Rimmer’s darkly evocative images imply untold personal narratives and the significance of place. Rimmer notes as he poetically tells the tale of the ‘Nature Boy’ series: You cannot be untouched by a landscape of absence, an unforgiving land of Mallee and Eucalyptus woodlands and red earth on the edge the grain belt. Where decades of over cropping and droughts create struggle that changes people, mentally and physically.

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Peter DUDDING Mamma Mia Abba Sleeping, 2015 Drawing Oil pastel on paper #14373 Purchased as part of the NSW Arts and Disability Partnership, generously supported by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services and Create NSW.

Peter Dudding is an emerging artist who works with Studio A in North Sydney, a facility that supports and creates professional pathways for practitioners with intellectual disabilities. Possessed with an exuberant sense of colour, Dudding's work fuses gestural mark making with scrawled fragments of handwritten text referring to personal experience and preoccupations with music and popular culture. Peter Dudding's work is characterised by its expressiveness and simplification. Possessed with an exuberant sense of colour, Dudding's work fuses gestural mark making with scrawled fragments of handwritten text referring to personal experience and preoccupations with music and popular culture

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Peter DUDDING Saw her at the Station, 2016 Drawing Oil pastel on paper #14374

In 2016, Sydney painter Paul Williams curated Dudding's first solo exhibition, 'Pig Dog' at Firstdraft Gallery, from which these works derive. An outcome of a mentoring relationship facilitated by Studio A, Williams described Dudding's work as "like a hard slap in the face, or a good deep belly laugh, a smelly fart or a burp after a good meal – it's real and it wakes you up".

Purchased as part of the NSW Arts and Disability Partnership, generously supported by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services and Create NSW.

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Peter DUDDING Hospital Again, 2016 Drawing Oil pastel on paper #14375

In 2019 Peter Dudding and his long time collaborator Paul Williams were invited to undertake a three month residency at Hazelhurst Arts Centre with Master printmaker Matthew Ablitt. Purchased as part of the NSW Arts and Disability Partnership, generously supported by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services and Create NSW.

Purchased as part of the NSW Arts and Disability Partnership, generously supported by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services and Create NSW.

ARTBANK.GOV.AU

Caring for your Artbank collection

Caring for your collection Follow these tips

In welcoming Artbank works into your space, follow these tips on looking after them for us; • Advise any cleaning staff to take great care when cleaning areas around artworks. • Contact your consultant if a work needs maintenance like dusting or cleaning. • Please ensure the artworks remain untouched and left where they were installed. • If you need the artworks moved – just call us! We will arrange this straight away for you. • If you notice damage to any work let us know straight away so we can save the artwork.

Telephone: 1800 251 651

Contact Artbank

8 min Surry Hills Station Artbank Sydney

3 min Green Square Station

Artbank Sydney

9 min Charles St Tram Stop 8 min Peel St Tram Stop

Artbank Melbourne 10 min Collingwood Station

Artbank Melbourne

6 min McIver Station 10 min Port of Perth Ferry

Artbank Perth

enquiries@ artbank.gov.au

1 800 251 651 or +61 2 9697 6000

1800 251 651

By appointment (Monday – Friday)

222 Young Street Waterloo NSW 2017

18—24 Down Street Collingwood VIC 3066

PO Box 409 Surry Hills NSW 2010

PO Box 1535 Collingwood VIC 3066

Mezzanine Level Hyatt Regency Perth Level 1 99 Adelaide Terrace Perth WA 6000 PO Box 409 Surry Hills NSW 2010

Artbank acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia.

Tiger Yaltangki, Malpa Wiru (Good Friends), 2015. Next page: Artbank Sydney, photo Tom Ferguson

6 min Redfern Station

Get in touch with an Artbank Consultant today and help support the Australian contemporary artists of tomorrow!