John Perceval: All That We Are

This exhibition surveys twenty-five years of the career of John de Burgh Perceval (1923–2000), a maverick figure in the creative circle associated with John and Sunday Reed at Heide and an important contributor to the evolution of modernist art in Melbourne.

Perceval was producing works of considerable competency and psychological power by the age of nineteen. Active as a painter from the late 1930s and emerging publicly in the early 1940s, he produced a unique body of work that was fundamentally humanist in orientation. As his practice expanded across painting, drawing and ceramics, he created fresh, expressive images and forms that register the joys and fears and frailties and strengths underpinning human existence. His deeply personal vision and readily identifiable aesthetic have secured him an undisputed place in the canon of twentieth-century Australian art.

All That We Are follows Perceval’s creative trajectory as he shifted from unsettling portrayals of childhood memories and wartime experiences to exuberant imagery inspired by the European Old Masters and later gestural, vibrant land and seascapes. Among the examples of his accomplished ceramic practice, the exhibition includes 28 of his celebrated angel sculptures from the 1950s and early 1960s.