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[title]Southeast Queensland is no slouch when it comes to art galleries. The Queensland Art Gallery, a huge, airy, brutalist masterpiece on the city’s South Bank, has been a superb venue for art in Brisbane since the 1980s, and the opening of its sister venue GOMA in 2006 added a cinematheque and an embarrassment of great exhibition spaces to the precinct. Fine art fans are not left wanting in the Sunshine State capital.
But an hour down the road on the Gold Coast? While the Goldie has long boasted a vibrant craft and art scene, going to a gallery has not traditionally been on most visitors’ radars so much as sun, sand, surf and schoolies.
That’s a perception that may change with the opening of Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection New York, at the impressive new HOTA (Home of the Arts) Gallery.
Originally planned to open the gallery with a bang – but delayed two years due to Covid – Pop Masters brings out the big guns of pop. There are 24 Andy Warhols – silkscreens, drawings, Polaroids, and even a digital work retrieved from a 1980s floppy disk. They include very famous portraits of Dolly Parton, Mao Tse-Tung and Jacqueline Kennedy. Two giants of the 1980s New York street art scene, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, are both represented in the show with major works.
Andy Warhols include famous portraits of Dolly Parton, Mao Tse-Tung and Jacqueline Kennedy
The dozen other artists in Pop Masters include gigantic names of both yesteryear and now. There’s a stunning Julian Schnabel portrait of Frida Kahlo painted on broken crockery. A Damien Hirst ‘pill’ picture has over 4,000 painstakingly positioned pharmaceutical tablets. There’s a Jeff Koons in the show, works by pop pioneers Richard Prince and Tom Wesselmann, and two pieces by contemporary street art star KAWS.
Basquiat’s groundbreaking works are displayed in conversation with contemporary African and African-American pop artists including Mikeline Thomas (who coincidentally spent time as a student on exchange in nearby Lismore). Curator Bradley Vincent has taken pains to draw connections between classic pop art and the contemporary movements that draw inspiration from it.
Pop Masters is the first big international art show for HOTA, a huge, modern, six-level gallery that opened in May 2021 in tropical parkland a few blocks behind the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise. (The contruction budget of $60.5 million was part of a massive $399 million budget to deliver the entire HOTA arts precinct, which includes an outdoor stage and a bridge across the Nerang River.) The gallery features a highly acclaimed fine-dining restaurant, Palette, and a rooftop bar with spectacular views. If you didn’t know about it, you can blame the impact of Covid – or perhaps you can blame perceptions of the Gold Coast.
HOTA is a huge, modern, five-level gallery built in tropical parkland a few blocks behind the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise
“I actually started my career on the Gold Coast in the late ’90s,” says HOTA’s director of gallery and visual arts, Tracy Cooper-Lavery, “and worked in what are now the former gallery spaces in the original building. And when that building opened in 1986, pretty much from day one, the galleries were too small.”
Cooper-Lavery says that the new HOTA Gallery – pronounced, in a nod to the local weather, ‘hotter’ – was designed to rival the state galleries, both in scale and in terms of programming. Negotiations with the Jose Mugrabi Foundation, the biggest collector of Andy Warhols in the world, began six years ago before construction on the building had even commenced.
“It was great to be able to actually go to New York pre-Covid and have that discussion face to face,” Cooper-Lavery explains. “Because I do think that that really makes a difference, rather than these random phone calls from people on the other side of the world in a place you've never heard of talking about a gallery that isn't even out of the ground.
“I talked about the Gold Coast and how there was this real shift happening in this notion of having a cultural experience here, as part of a tourism experience.”
Andy Warhol famously quipped: “Art is anything you can get away with.” And you could say that a giant, modern, multicoloured temple to fine art erected smack bang in the Australian hedonism capital is certainly getting away with something. But then, the Gold Coast region is famous for theme parks, and what is an art gallery if not a theme park for the mind?