PLAY ON: the art of sport

10 years of the Basil Sellers Art Prize

25 May - 4 August 2019
Main Gallery & Margaret Scott Gallery

Play On: The art of sport celebrates 10 years of the Basil Sellers Art Prize, the prestigious and distinctively Australian biennial exhibition that reflects upon one of our great national obsessions – sport. Featuring the winners and other key works from all five installments of the Prize, the exhibition brings together diverse explorations of the personal and collective significance of sport and sporting culture from some of Australia’s most accomplished artists.

Play On: The art of sport encompasses a dynamic range of media, with works that respond to an equally extensive range of sporting genres, including community footy, women’s boxing, ground-keeping, gymnastics and AFL. They portray the sports arena as a powerful theatre of emotion, where hope, fear, adversity, triumph, glory and defeat are writ large. Even more strikingly though, sport is used as a lens through which to contemplate a number of society’s most cogent issues; from mechanisms of cultural belonging and marginalisation, gender and race relations, to technology’s impact on our physical limits.

Artists: Tony Albert, Richard Bell, Lauren Brincat, Jon Campbell, Daniel Crooks, Gabrielle de Vietri, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Shaun Gladwell, Richard Lewer, Fiona McMonagle, Josie Kunoth Petyarre, Dinni Kunoth Kemarre, Kerrie Poliness, Khaled Sabsabi and Gerry Wedd.

Curators: Jacqueline Doughty, Samantha Comte and Alyce Neal.

Image: Richard Lewer, The Theatre of Sports, 2016, oil on canvas. Photography: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide. Collection of Basil Sellers AM.

Play On: The art of sport – Daniel Crooks from NETS Victoria on Vimeo.