Heide Museum of Modern Art to reopen 30 June 2020

Following updated guidelines from the Victorian Government, Heide Museum of Modern Art today announces a reopening date of Tuesday 30 June 2020, after its temporary closure due to COVID-19 restrictions. The museum is implementing the physical distancing, capacity limits and increased hygiene measures outlined in the Government’s phased roadmap to recovery. Heide will reopen all of its galleries, including two major exhibitions, Joy Hester: Remember Me and Carolyn Eskdale: Memory Horizon.

Artistic Director Lesley Harding said, “While our gardens and sculpture park have never closed we are delighted to be able to invite the public back into our galleries to see this landmark exhibition exploring the legacy and work of Joy Hester, as well as contemporary artist Carolyn Eskdale’s celebrated intervention in Heide Modern. In accordance with the Victorian Chief Health Officer’s guidelines, we’ll be implementing public health and physical distancing measures including timed-entry online ticketing, queue management systems, increased deep cleaning of facilities and hand sanitiser stations to keep our community safe.”

On display until 4 October 2020, Joy Hester: Remember Me celebrates the centenary of the birth of Australian modernist artist Joy Hester (1920–1960) with a major survey of her distinctive oeuvre. The exhibition is the first solo exhibition of Hester’s art in almost twenty years and brings together more than 140 significant works from public and private collections, including seldom-seen impromptu studies that shed light on Hester’s unique style and creative process.

Carolyn Eskdale: Memory Horizon, which received critical acclaim in the short period that it was open in March, is an exhibition of new work by Australian artist Carolyn Eskdale that will be presented until  27 September 2020. Featuring a series of room-scale site-specific sculptures, the exhibition responds to the unique modernist architecture of Heide Modern and animates the former residence as its own cast object. For the first time, previously inaccessible parts of this iconic building have been opened to the public.

Continuing in the Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery until 14 March 2021, Albert Tucker: Marking the Past explores connections between acclaimed Australian modernist artist Albert Tucker’s images of scarred landscapes, wounded soldiers, explorers, and biblical figures.

A new exhibition Archie Barry: Fistimuff by contemporary artist Archie Barry will be presented in the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery from 30 June to 11 October 2020. Inhabiting a space between video artwork, devotional poetry, performance and music video, Fistimuff is presented as a long-form video self-portrait. Barry destabilises commonplace experiences of domesticity and the human body to propose an altogether more open-ended, fluid, and multifaceted understanding of self. As the latest iteration of their cyclical working method, Barry will produce a new performance work for Heide to be shown on the closing weekend of the exhibition.

Heide continues to offer experiences of its collection, exhibitions, and key programs online through the Heide At Home platform. Visitors are encouraged to monitor Heide’s social media channels and website for updates.

heide.com.au