24 July 2016

SAM is delighted to announce that the newly acquired Tent Hill Gully, by Albert Namatjira is now on show. This recent donation from Carrillo Gantner AO, SAM Foundation board member and Chairman of the Sidney Myer Fund Foundation is the first in a line of new acquisitions that will be on display throughout the duration of 80/80: Eighty Years of SAM, The Collection exhibition on the New Acquisitions wall.

2016 marks 80 years since the early beginnings of the SAM collection. Over the years the collection has grown to include many notable works, with the ceramics collection one of the most significant in Australia. The exhibition 80/80: Eighty Years of SAM, The Collection, celebrates many jewels in the SAM collection acquired over the 80 years. A series of new acquisitions will be showcased with Albert Namatjira’s lyric landscape the first to be presented.

SAM Director, Dr Rebecca Coates says:

“This work has great significance for SAM’s collection. It showcases the landscape of Namatjira’s own country in Central Australia, captured in the vivid blues and fluidly evocative realist watercolour style for which he is renowned. Generous donations and gifts of this kind add to the stories we can tell around the collection and enable us to continue to review and reappraise our own histories.”

Tent Hill Gully, by Albert Namatjira will be on display until September.

Further information about Albert Namatjira and Tent Hill Gully:

Albert Namatjira is best known for his watercolours of the landscapes of northern and central Australia. Tent Hill Gully depicts a scene in the Tent Hill region, Northern Territory. The work is a fine example of Namatjira’s skill with the delicate but challenging watercolour media. Namatjira’s deft application of his ‘signature luminous blue colour’ is subtly apparent in the details of the tree-tops in the background of Tent Hill Gully. This artwork is also an important link to several pieces in the SAM Collection. Of particular note is a watercolour by Walter Ebatarinja, one of Namatjira’s students, as well as the many ceramics by the Hermannsburg Potters, which include a small, lidded terracotta jar by Namatjira’s granddaughter Elaine Namatjira.

Image: Albert Namatjira, Tent Hill Gully c.1940, watercolour on paper, donated by Carrillo Gantner through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift Program, 2016, is now showing at SAM.