This exhibition celebrates the work of Lloyd Rees (1895-1988), particularly his works painted in Tasmania between 1967 and 1988 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Rees was one of the pre-eminent Australian landscape artists of the twentieth century and a highly accomplished painter, draughtsman and printmaker.
His vision was highly individual and idiosyncratic, and little influenced by the artistic trends that waxed and waned throughout a long career. Rees sought to build on the legacy of European landscape painting, taking inspiration from artists such as Corot and Turner while also drawing on a much younger Australian tradition. Always respected and increasingly revered throughout his life, his approach shifted from the precise analytical drawings and paintings of the 1920s and 30s through the more sombre, rhythmic works of the 1940s and 50s, to the expositions of light that characterised his later works.
Drawing on the extensive collection of the Rees family, the collections of several major public galleries and a number of private collectors, the exhibition explores the influence of Tasmania, and in particular the Tasmanian light, on Rees’ work.