Augustine Dall'Ava—sculpture and drawings 1983–2003

The first comprehensive survey of prominent Victorian artist Augustine Dall'Ava included over sixty sculptures spanning two important decades of the artist's career, from 1983 to the present.

Dall’Ava’s carved, assembled and painted sculptures, often comprised of various stones and wood, are renowned for the unmistakable style of precise, lyrical abstraction that is often said to be evocative of the dreamlike and biomorphic imagery of Juan Miro, Yves Tanguy and other Surrealist and Dada artists.

This exhibition focused on Dall'Ava's work after 1983, recognising a shift that occurred during this period in the artist’s approach to composition. After this time, he abandoned the strict geometry and rectangular framing devices of his earliest work in favour of organic and open structures that, in turn, give way to the prismatic qualities of the latest sculpture. In the late eighties, colour also became an increasingly important aspect of the artist's sculptures.