Parallel Universe—Recent Acquisitions 2021–22

Parallel Universe is an exhibition of acquisitions brought into the collection over the past two years. Over more than 120 years, the Gallery’s collection has grown through the generosity of private donors and this exhibition celebrates the collectors, artists and bequests that have contributed to the works acquired in 2021–22. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a suite of works by Louise Paramor in acknowledgement of the complementary, parallel activities of private collectors and galleries in forming public collections.    

This is a disparate group of works but there are dialogues between them—sometimes in the conceptual teasing out of a subject, or in others an unexpectedly shared intention by artists working in vastly different social and cultural contexts. We see here intersecting responses to landscape, to country, to environment, to abstraction, and to the very acts of making and seeing.