Heide Museum of Modern Art will reopen on Saturday 30 October 2021 with the first retrospective of Margel Hinder (1905–1995), one of Australia’s most important and dynamic, yet underrated, modernist sculptors. The exhibition Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion will be displayed in Heide’s main galleries from Saturday 30 October 2021 until 6 February 2022 and is a tribute to her great, and ever-expanding, creative vision.
Developed in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the exhibition spans Margel Hinder’s five-decade career and showcases approximately 70 sculptures sourced from private and public collections across Australia, as well as the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ rich holdings of both her works and archive.
Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion aims to redress Hinder’s profile as one of the most underestimated Australian sculptors of the 20th century and uncovers the expansive nature of her creativity, and her skill in giving sculptural form to universal concepts like time and motion in materials expressive of the era. From her early carvings in wood and stone in the 1930s and 40s to the ‘space age’ kinetic and wire works of the 1950s and major public commissions in the 1960s, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion traces the development of Hinder’s practice and her role in shaping modernist sculpture in Australia.
Exhibition highlights include Hinder’s commanding kinetic works, whose slow rotations encapsulate a sense of the world in perpetual motion, and an immersive installation based on two of Hinder’s major public sculptures. Created by Dr. Andrew Yip, Lecturer in Art & Design at the University of New South Wales, the life-size digital reconstructions are of two of the most significant public sculptures of Hinder’s career: the Civic Park Fountain, Newcastle 1961–66 and the now decommissioned Northpoint Fountain 1975. This project allows for a presence of this important component of Hinder’s art within the context of her retrospective and demonstrates the sophistication of her ideas, with her inclusion of carefully choreographed moving water amid object formations.
Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion
30 October 2021 to 6 February 2022
Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Victoria, 3105
