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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / Tom Roberts from every angle

"Shearing of the Rams" by Tom Roberts.
“Shearing of the Rams” by Tom Roberts.
PRESENTING more than 130 pieces from public and private collections, the National Gallery of Australia brings together a range of works by painter Tom Roberts for this year’s summer exhibition. 

The expansive retrospective, simply titled “Tom Roberts”, provides audiences with an opportunity to experience the breadth of the artist’s practice, which includes paintings, pastels, drawings, prints and sculpture.

It is evident through Robert’s earlier paintings such as “Still Life with Pomegranates” that he had an astute ability to communicate depth through the interplay of light and shadow. 

It is perhaps this quality of Roberts’ brushwork that began to thrive after returning to Australia from England in 1885. To view his oeuvre en masse enables audiences to gain an insight into how the luminosity of the Australian sun played an integral role in Roberts’ narrative pieces.

There is vitality in Roberts’ depictions of the landscape as iconic pieces “Shearing of the Rams” and “A Break Away!” create tension between movement and stillness. 

Undeniably romanticised, Roberts’ paintings present the labour of rural life, often referred to as “national narratives”, these scenes convey no apparent hardship of a colonial life spent in opposition to the land.

A point of contention may arise from the National Gallery of Australia’s decision to display such a large-scale exhibition of Tom Roberts’ work.  In our current social climate one might ask what the works from a colonialist white male offer us in regard to nationalist debate, indigenous land rights and the feminine discourse? 

But, of course, “Tom Roberts” is an exhibition demonstrating one artist’s contribution to the turning point of Australian Art. 

Influential to the practice of Fred Williams and Arthur Boyd, and seen in Dianne Jones’ revisionist 2001 work, “Shearing the Rams”, Roberts’ work accounts for a period of time in which Australia began to construct its own national identity through visual representation.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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