Description

Buxton Contemporary was initiated in 2014 with a landmark act of philanthropy through the Michael and Janet Buxton Foundation. Along with the donation of their significant collection of contemporary Australian art to the University of Melbourne, the Buxtons provided funds to build this public art gallery on the university’s Victorian College of the Arts Southbank campus, designed by Fender Katsalidis.

Opening its doors in 2018, Buxton Contemporary continues the ethos of Michael and Janet Buxton’s approach to collecting by supporting contemporary artists and engaging with the development of artistic practice.

Buxton Contemporary’s dynamic program of solo and thematic exhibitions, artist commissions and publishing and learning initiatives connects contemporary art to new audiences, and demonstrates the transformative potential of creative thinking and art-led exchanges of ideas in an educational context.

What's On

Poetry Goes No Further Than Language: A historical moment of art becoming art again is Buxton Contemporary's major exhibition that revisits a defining moment in mid-1980s China, when a group of artists began to question all existing values and presumptions about art.

Among them were the Beijing collective New Measurement Group and Shanghai-based artist Qian Weikang. Dissatisfied with the mainstream visual trends of expression and symbolism, they turned instead to conceptualism, using systems of measurement, process and chance as their artistic material.

Active for only a short time, their experiments circulated among small networks of artists and critics before many of the works were dispersed, dismantled or destroyed.

Drawing on extensive research and careful reconstruction, this exhibition reunites the complete experimental output of New Measurement Group alongside key works by Qian Weikang, bringing this rarely seen chapter of art history to Australia for the first time.

A new responsive commission by Melbourne-based artist Darcey Bella Arnold unfolds throughout the exhibition, creating a dialogue across time, space and language.