New Partnership: Art in Focus with 101 Collins Street

Installation view of Nina Sanadze, Call to Peace, across the West Pools (ground floor) of 101 Collins Street. Photo: 101 Collins

The Ground Floor of 101 Collins presents a significant opportunity to exhibit and engage with art. 101 Collins has partnered with Gertrude to harness this visibility and showcase a bi-annual rotation that reflects the vitality of local contemporary artists and art from an organisation at the forefront of contemporary arts practice.

Working closely with Gertrude co-directors Tracy Burgess and Mark Feary, curator Emily Cormack selects artists and works intended to spark conversation, provoke thought and provide a platform for emerging artists to showcase their works. Located in the West Lounge Pools, this rotating, bi-annual presentation sits in conversation with newly commissioned permanent artworks, displayed throughout Flinders and Collins Street as well as the East Garden and Pool.

Installation view of Noriko Nakamura, Milking My Heart / Limestone, presented in the West Lounge Pools at 101 Collins Street. Photo: 101 Collins

First Rotation: October 2022 - April 2023
Noriko Nakamura
Milking My Heart / Limestone

Noriko Nakamura completed a Fine Art Foundation Diploma at Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London, before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012. Nakamura experiments with the transformational potential of materials in order to explore the relationship that exists between humans and the material world.

For 'Art in Focus', Nakamura used traditional hand-carving techniques to transform limestone from inanimate and heavy into a playful form suggestive of movement and lightness.

Pictured above are Womb Realm (2021) and Milking My Heart (2019).

Nakamura participated in the Gertrude Studio Program from 2016 – 2018 and has exhibited in the Gertrude artistic program including in exhibitions The Beginning of Time. The End of Time. and solo exhibition Erosion at Gertrude Glasshouse in 2017.

Nakamura has presented solo exhibitions at West Space, Melbourne and TCB Art Inc., Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited at XYZ Collective, Tokyo; RM Gallery, Auckland; Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch; Murray White Room, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria Studio, Melbourne and Sutton Projects, Melbourne.

Nina Sanadze, The Theatre of Folly, Polystyrene, plaster, steel, cement, sand, imitation gold leaf, acrylic, pigment, glue, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Second Rotation: April 2023 - September 2023
Nina Sanadze
Call to Peace

The series of installations by Georgian-Australian artist Nina Sanadze are an evolution on her recent series entitled Call to Peace (March 2022 – ongoing).

Sanadze is presenting multiple variations of her replicas of an existing WWII Soviet bronze monument also entitled Call to Peace. Sanadze reconfigures this sculpture, playing with scale and form, so that the work becomes emblematic of the passage of history, and sculpture’s mutable role within it.

At 101 Collin’s West Pool cast replicas of this sculpture are presented as relics, poised in the process of deconstruction, partially reconstructed into new forms. Reminiscent of the 2nd Century Hellenic winged goddess of victory, Nike of Samothrace, the winged female form seemingly emerges from rubble, defiant yet graffitied and broken, or she stands supersized and white, cloaked in rich gold or vibrant, optimistic blue.

Sanadze’s work invites viewers to engage with history and culture in poignant ways. Her careful combinations of site and sculpture generates new ways of thinking about the relationship between materials and place. She draws attention to our own individual agency, reminding us of our ability to generate peace, and ensuring that her artworks become powerful tools for social change.

Sanadze is a current Gertrude Studio Artist (2022 – 2024).

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New Partnership: Art in Focus with 101 Collins Street