James C. Sourris’s benefaction to the Gallery began in 1999 — at the time of GOMA’s conception — through the gift of 21 moving-image works by prominent Australian and international artists. Soon after, the philanthropist’s focus shifted to Australian contemporary artists across all media. Building on an earlier tribute, a new exhibition at GOMA showcases the unwavering vision and incredible generosity of James C. Sourris AM, writes Peter McKay.

Time and again, James C. Sourris AM has collected work by artists who display immense courage in their creations: artists who assert their difference and independence, and who bear the light of truth, often at incredibly difficult moments, when the tide of opinion is moving counter to their own. Complementing this bravery, Sourris clearly also responds to a palpable sense of beauty, acquiring works that invigorate his vision and energise his bodily charge. He does so in the sincere hope that these works strengthen those same sensibilities of courage and beauty residing within other viewers.

In 2011, the Gallery curated an exhibition that celebrated ten years of contemporary art and revealed how James’s first decade of collecting, and then gifting, to the Gallery had evolved. He has sustained that support: ‘Courage and Beauty’ is a sequel, comprising works gifted and supported in the subsequent decade, with a great number never having been publicly exhibited until now.

Curated in three strands — Transcendental, Symbolic and Elemental — the exhibition commences with an exploration of the transcendental, and appropriately, with the work of the artist that first caught Sourris’s eye — the paintings of Albert Namatjira.

I remember clearly when I first became interested in art. The year was 1954 and I was selected by the school Principal to be in charge of the library. On three of four walls were works by Albert Namatjira, donated to the college by a wealthy grazier. I was so enamoured with the paintings that I was determined that one day I would own a Namatjira. Little did I know it would take me 31 years to achieve my ambition . . .¹

As more recent inheritors of Namatjira’s legacy, Gordon Bennett (Landscape painting 1988), Vernon Ah Kee (brutalities 2014) and Richard Bell (Who made God savage 2012) engage with a more direct social and political critique, asking questions about cultural perspective, identity, oppression, denial and displacement. Judy Watson also highlights the ravages of colonial violence but does so evocatively in wanami 2019, using blue as the colour of memory, water and sky.

To convey the violence he witnessed in 1945, on the frontline of World War Two, German–Australian artist Udo Sellbach created his principally abstract painting Untitled (April-May) 1968 (which appears on the cover of the accompanying publication). Its flat, often black shapes with irregular, complex edges, recall the devastated cityscapes that surrounded him like a void, obliterated by intense bombing.

In contrast, Gareth Sansom’s monumental painting Metamorphosis 2017 is filled with imaginative and colourful shapes and structures that, on closer inspection, teeter on the precipice of formlessness. In its entirety, Metamorphosis appears to picture a psychic landscape, with the main abstract elements floating on an oceanic horizon, framed by figures mimicking mountainous terrain. In a similar vein, Jon Cattapan’s The Bowl 2018 considers subtle aspects of the universal, as well as gesture at its most elusive.

Grounded in both time and place, James Fardoulys’s quixotic painting Blue roses 1964 is an expression of community and Greek culture in Australia.

Next is the Symbolic strand, with a highlight being Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s supremely ambitious late painting Merne (Everything) 1996, a magnificent example of the artist’s groundbreaking synthesis of ceremonial body painting and the legacy of early central Western Desert dot painting, embodied and eclipsed within the freedom of her gesture. Similarly, the shimmering optical field of Yukultji Napangati’s gestures in Untitled 2014 entice, then command, the eye. Her repetitive, undulating lines in an extremely reduced palette are interrupted by a domed form in the lower centre referencing Yunala, a rock hole site where water collects among the sandhills to the west of the Kiwirrkura community in Western Australia.

By employing varying degrees of abstraction, some artists open us up to their subjects on an emotional plane. Rosslynd Piggott’s Evaporated garden, powdered sky 2014, an expansive, tantalising and somewhat elusive painting of the Giardino di Ninfa (the Garden of Ninfa, in central Italy) is one such work, though, interestingly, the artist does not consider her triptych to be abstract at all.

Elemental, the final grouping of works in the exhibition, presents abstract works with a stricter, arguably more mechanical, and at times more notional, character, with the National Gallery of Victoria’s influential 1968 exhibition ‘The Field’ as a touchstone. Dick Watkins’s The Mooche 1968 was, in fact, included in ‘The Field’, and was among the most lyrical paintings of the exhibition. Its lozenge-shaped canvas heightens its rhythmic composition, eliciting a sense of musicality that has rarely been matched to this day. Other alumni of ‘The Field’ include Normana Wight, represented by her hypnotically silkscreened Untitled yellow‑green 1970; Robert Hunter, whose numerous white‑on‑white studies challenge the sensitivity of our perceptions of geometry, tone and tint; and Robert Rooney, with his bright, sharp, repetitive and entirely enigmatic Canine capers VII 1969–79, inspired by the cut‑out crafts printed on boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

Finally, as part of the Elemental strand, works by Peter Kennedy and Ross Manning experiment with and explore the possibilities of light, technology and innovation, while Peter Cripps considers architectural function and museum culture.

Surveying two decades of Sourris’s collecting, we see a surge of heady themes and concepts: the illusion of perspective and the transcendent picture plane; multidimensional burdens of oppression growing plurality and the possibility of more complex identities and transformation; the potential for colour and materials to make symbolic allusions in an emotive, and even intuitive, dimension; and the speculative potential of entirely new approaches to art‑making, embracing rigorous technique and enhanced methods and technologies.

Given the title of the exhibition, we might be inclined to group these works across a strict divide of courage and beauty; however, it is the spillage and slippage across these categories that animates each work. What strengthens them as a collection is their demonstration that beauty can be understood in displays of courage, and courage can be derived from an internalisation of beauty.

Looking back over 20 years, the growth of both collection and collector is plain to see. It is a growth of vision and insight that, in the case of James C. Sourris AM, is to be generously shared with us all.

Peter McKay is Curatorial Manager, Australian Art. ‘Courage and Beauty: The James C. Sourris AM Collection’ is on display in the Marica Sourris and James C. Sourris AM Galleries (3.3 and 3.4), GOMA, from 3 September 2022 to 25 June 2023.

Endnote

1. ‘In conversation: Tony Ellwood with James C. Sourris AM’, in Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris AM Collection [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2011, p.29.

Feature image: Vernon Ah Kee’s Lenny (Timer) Miller 2008, installed for ’Courage and Beauty’, GOMA, September 2021 / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the QAGOMA Foundation 2022. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program / © Vernon Ah Kee/Copyright Agency / Photograph: J Ruckli, QAGOMA