Image credit: Fritz Kos, Art Gallery of Western Australia 1979, State Library of Western Australia. Sourced from the collections of the State Library of Western Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia. (160419PD)

This exhibition opens out the many layers of the history of the building’s development featuring images of the building in construction and its early days, along with ephemera such as building models, plans, diagrams and drawings, and early promotional brochures about the structure and its place in the Cultural Centre.

The iconic structure marked the end of a 10 year building boom and had been dreamt of for years before that by Gallery Director Frank Norton, whose own international researches and design thinking also fed the building’s final form. 

PUBLICATION
Delivering a concise overview of the new gallery project and its place within the Cultural Centre, including a biographical sketch of Charles Sierakowski, a factual history of the building’s construction, how gallery spaces where conceived, how they have changed over time, how various exhibitions have utilised them, how directors, curators and exhibition designers have engaged with them. To local architectural significance and context, as well as the building’s inspiration, influence and legacy.

Contributing authors include, AGWA Curators; Robert Cook, Melissa Harpley and Dunja Rmandic. As well as essay's from Patrick Ford, Annette Condello, Merindah Bairnsfather-Scott, Noel Nannup and Andrew Murray.

$32.95, available from the AGWA Shop.

AGWA 40
2019 marks and celebrates the 40th year anniversary of the main Gallery building as AGWA presents a series of exhibitions and special events looking at the building: the exhibit Perth Brutal: Dreaming in Concrete, plus talks, performances and a symposium presented with Curtin University’s School of Design and the Built Environment. The art of the 1970s in WA will also be revisited in the exhibition That Seventies Feeling...the Late Modern.