LRG COLLECTION: HOME

Take a peek inside our collections and discover the themes and ideas behind them.

HOME

Home may signify a warm place, a familiar place, or perhaps even simply a prosaic, ordinary place. How can we think about the word and concept ‘home’? Here are just a few examples of artworks from our collection that elaborate on the theme of ‘home’.

Janina Green

Mr. Luscher, 2009
C Type print
55 x 64 cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Mrs. Gavran, 2009
C Type print, 55 x 64 cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

The artist grew up as a working class migrant girl in the Latrobe Valley and this had a profound impact on her work over many years.

These photographs are from a series of images of men and women who are survivors of the 150 Ukrainian families (amongst them the artist’s parents), who came to the Latrobe Valley in the 1950s. They had come from Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany after the Second World War to work in the powerhouse, briquette factory and coal mines.

The series of photographs were exhibited in “Where the Heart is – Janina Green Portraits” at Latrobe Regional Gallery in 2009.

Jan Senbergs

Untitled, N.D.
Pencil on paper
33 x 39 cm image
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Jan Senbergs is a major Australian painter who staged his first exhibitions in 1960s. Senberg’s late paintings feature dark labyrinthine cityscapes.

Drawing has been a significant part of his art practice. Senberg’s drawing often possesses a sense of mapping and architectural form such as in this drawing where the desk and the objects it holds and covers, become one.

This drawing may be one that the artist did in his own painting studio.

Mike Brown

Fifteen Views of Gippsland, 1978
Acrylic on canvas
102 x 81 cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Eclectic in style and on many occasions controversial, Mike Brown made a substantial contribution to Australian art. Pop art, assemblage, graffiti, pornographic styled works, realist paintings, and experimental music were all part of Mike Brown’s creative output.

Brown spent about 4 years of his life near Foster in Gippsland after fleeing Sydney where he was prosecuted for obscenity. This realist style painting by the artist from 1978 depicts places in Gippsland. File notes at Latrobe Regional Gallery indicates this work may include scenes from Shallows Inlet, Foster and Sandy Point. The painting was included in an exhibition of the artist held at Latrobe Regional Gallery in 1978.

Mary Meyer

Door In The Brick Wall, ND
Oil on canvas
30 x 20 cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

An undated impressionist inspired painting by Mary Meyer, gifted from her estate after the artist passed away aged 97 in 1975. Latrobe Regional Gallery would welcome any more information a member of the community may have about Mary Meyer.

Pauline Delaney

Art Deco Flower Perfume Bottle, 1990
Blown and fused glass
13.8 x 8.7 x 8.2 cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Pauline Delaney is a highly regarded senior glass maker in Australia. Through the generous gift of Ingrid McCaughey in 1996 a number of glass works and perfume bottles became an integral part of the Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection.

This particular work was part of a large showcase of Australian Glass shown in Darmstadt, Germany in 1984.

Jacky Redgate

Straightcut II, #27, 2005-2006
Type C photograph
75 x 98 cm 
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

A major contemporary artist in Australian photography, Jacky Redgate is interested in the photographic illusionistic space. Redgate is interested in how photography translates three dimensional things into two dimensional space. In this highly regarded series Redgate uses domestic modular containers and mirrors to create puzzling conundrums.

Commentators have also noted the relationship between this series of work from Redgate and the gridded abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian, and photographer Florence Henri (1893-1982) who used mirrors to break up and fragment her subjects.

Pezaloom

Life Boats on Land, 2017
Type C photograph
297 X 420 mm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Long After Love Left, 2014
Type C photograph
297 X 420 mm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Morwell artist Paul Berryman aka Pezaloom has developed a photographic practice concerned with ghosts of lives lived. Pezaloom has spent much of his life in the Latrobe Valley which he describes as having an odd “menacing aesthetic”.

These images document Morwell as a place with a past and they are poetic images that document traces, including personal and resonant artefacts of earlier residents.

In Life Boats on Land Pezaloom has photographed housing that was until recently home for some low paid workers. The second photograph here contrasts the idyllic view portrayed in the print on the wall with the state of the ceiling of this abandoned local home.

David Thorp

Wood Lines, circa 1982
Silver gelatin print, 139 x 43cm
Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection

Thorp was a British conceptual artist when he came to Australia in 1981 after an invitation to stage a major exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art. He returned to the UK in 1986, and is now a significant British curator.

As an artist Thorp was interested in performance art, sculpture and theatre such as Kafka, Beckett and Artaud. His work often expressed a sense of vulnerability. A sense of humour and fragility can also be found in this work. Is the artist climbing the ladder or is the ladder on top of him? The rungs of the ladder can also be seen as a unit of measure, the artist seven rungs tall. Like the worlds created by Kafka; there is here a sense of claustrophobia.