Heide Museum of Modern Art celebrates 40th anniversary with festivals, exhibitions and new healing garden

Heide Museum of Modern Art, set on sixteen acres of parkland with Yarra River frontage, has announced highlights from its 2021 program, celebrating the museum's 40th anniversary with the Heide Summer Festival, a diverse range of exhibitions and the opening of a much-anticipated Healing Garden within the Heide grounds.

Next year’s program builds on the museum’s longstanding commitment to support and present the work of women artists with a significant retrospective of Australian sculptor Margel Hinder in collaboration with the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian premiere of an award-winning video installation by Polish artist Agnieszka Polska, and the first career survey exhibition by contemporary artist Stanislava Pinchuk. Heide will also stage the first survey in twenty years of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen and a major Sidney Nolan exhibition at the end of the year to mark the museum’s 40th anniversary on 12th November.

In addition to the exhibition program, Heide with the support of the Shine On Foundation will open the much anticipated new Healing Garden in 2021. Inspired by Heide founder Sunday Reed’s profound love for her garden and designed by the award-winning landscape architects Openwork in collaboration with the Heide gardening team, the Healing Garden draws on the curative qualities of plants and the natural environment to provide a place for relaxation, joy, and rejuvenation for all visitors, but particularly for vulnerable communities. A public opening is slated for early 2021 once work is completed. 

Heide Museum of Modern Art Artistic Director, Lesley Harding notes “It is exciting to present the 2021 program, which both celebrates the past 40 years and looks ahead to a bright future for Heide. We have planned a range of thoughtful, poetic, and inspiring exhibitions that showcase the work of leading Australian and international artists, including the first significant retrospective of Australia’s ground-breaking modernist sculptor, Margel Hinder, and a career-long survey of respected Australian artist Robert Owen. We also look forward to inviting the public to enjoy our inaugural summer festival, and the newly designed Healing Garden - a soothing place for sensory experiences with programs for communities with a diversity of needs.”

Heide Summer Festival 16th January to 7th March 2021
Heide’s much-loved sculpture park will be activated over the summer months with an outdoor event series designed to support local performing artists, youth bands, and cultural festivals. The series has been supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and highlights of the nine-week program include:

• The Melbourne International Jazz Festival will curate a series of jazz performances by Victorian-based jazz artists across three Sundays in January.

• Over two weekends in February, Songlines will present First Nations musicians, dancers and storytellers and Midsumma will curate a weekend in February celebrating and supporting LGBTQIA+ communities and artists.

• The summer festival will end with a Trubacki Orkestar, performing authentic contemporary Balkan brass music from the rich traditions of Serbia, Macedonia, and beyond.

BLUE OVER TIME: ROBERT OWEN—A SURVEY | 27th February to 23rd May 2021
Heide Galleries
The first museum survey of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen’s work in Melbourne will be presented in the main exhibition space, Heide Galleries. Grounded in geometry and abstraction, Owen’s striking works are inspired by his diverse interests—encompassing philosophy and psychology, science and mathematics, music and literature—and reflect his incessant curiosity about the world. This exhibition will explore Owen’s varied 60-year career and feature new and more recent paintings and sculptural installations.

HEIDE X ALPHA60 X PATRICIA PICCININI: HUGS | 27th February to 14th March 2021
Heide Modern
This pop-up exhibition in Heide Modern features a new collaboration between Australian fashion label Alpha60 and acclaimed artist Patricia Piccinini. Teaming up for the first time, Alpha60 founders Georgie and Alex Cleary have created a series of whimsical, inspiring and emotive textiles based on Piccinini’s works, under the collective title Hugs – artwork/keepsakes emblematic of nurture and warmth, two themes that live at the heart of Piccinini’s complex and captivating sculptural forms.

PHOTO 2021: AGNIESZKA POLSKA: THE NEW SUN | 20th February to 20th June 2021
Kerry Gardner and Andrew Myer Project Gallery
Heide will present the Australian premiere of Agnieszka Polska’s award-winning video work, The New Sun, during the inaugural PHOTO 2021. Polska is an innovative Polish artist who investigates society’s shared experiences of environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. 'The New Sun' features a projection of the sun personified as an animated character bearing witness to the Earth’s increasing environmental calamity.

STANISLAVA PINCHUK: TERRA DATA | 20th March to 20th June 2021
Heide Modern
Ukrainian-Australian artist Stanislava Pinchuk is one of the most intriguing contemporary artists working today. This exhibition showcases powerful drawings that capture the changing topographies of war through data mapping, as well as terrazzo sculptures containing the detritus left behind by conflict—fragments of tiles, shotgun shells, SIM cards, plastics and tar. In her work, Pinchuk plots both the physical features of the land as well as the more abstract yet enduring residues of trauma. 

MARGEL HINDER: MODERN IN MOTION | 30th June to 10th October 2021
Heide Modern
The first dedicated retrospective of the work of vanguard modernist sculptor Margel Hinder. Revealing one of the most dynamic yet overlooked sculptural practices to have developed in Australia during the mid-twentieth century, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion explores the artist’s expansive creative vision and sense of the world in perpetual movement.

Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

BRUCE MUNRO: FROM SUNRISE ROAD | 12th June to 17th October 2021
Heide Galleries and Sculpture Park
Light is an essential element of the remarkable practice of British artist Bruce Munro, best known for his immersive, large-scale installations inspired largely by his interest in shared human experience. In 2021 at Heide, Munro will present his first museum exhibition in Australia, combining spectacular indoor and outdoor experiential artworks with intimate story-pieces. Bruce Munro: From Sunrise Road reveals the depth of the artist’s practice and the breadth of his sources, from the personal and literary to the philosophical and spiritual. At once contemplative, playful and thought-provoking, the exhibition will offer an unforgettable interactive experience that engages the senses and enriches the mind.

SIDNEY NOLAN: SEARCH FOR PARADISE | 30th October 2021 to 13th February 2022
Heide Galleris
One of Australia’s leading artists of the twentieth century, Sidney Nolan is synonymous with Heide, which for him was a Garden of Eden that he later saw as a season in hell. Nolan’s creativity was fueled by a life-long fascination with the elusive notion of paradise and the consequences of its loss. From his nostalgia for St Kilda, his childhood heaven, to his explorations of the Australian landscape and restless travels abroad, Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise examines one of the artist’s deepest impulses and the journey of self-discovery it engendered.

For more information on Heide Museum of Modern Art go to heide.com.au/whats-on/exhibitions/now-showing

Images
Top: Heide Museum of Modern Art 2021 festival
Centre above: Margel Hinder, Wire and Perspex Abstract c. 1955, painted wire, clear and coloured perspex on wood base - 77 x 83 x 56 cm - Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales
Centre below: Bruce Munro, Ferryman's Crossing I 2015, MDF, recycled CDs, light, 21.5 x 2.7 x 1.35 m, Photograph: Mark Pickthall, Originally commissioned by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. © Bruce Munro. All rights reserved
Above: Sidney Nolan, Bathers 1943, ripolin enamel on canvas, 62.9 x 75.5 cm, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne,  Bequest of John and Sunday Reed, 1982, © Sidney Nolan Trust.