An image is not available here yet.
View at the museum ↗After Heysen
Rosemary Laing2004
- Attribution
- Rosemary Laing Australian, 1959-2024
- Medium
- Chromogenic print
- Physical dimensions
- Paper: 124 × 266.1 cm (48 13/16 × 104 3/4 in.); frame: 124 × 266.1 cm (48 7/8 × 104 13/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Igor M. DaCosta
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public-domain image eligibility not established by this export
View the museum record ↗From the museum
For after Heysen , a depiction of gum trees in the Australian bush, Rosemary Laing engaged her national identity through a reference to the work of famed Australian landscape painter Hans Heysen (1877–1968). The photograph’s source is a 1909 drawing by Heysen, Summer , which adapts the French Barbizon vision of the rural idyll to the context of an expanding nation finding its way into the outback—apparently without heed to the path of ecological and cultural destruction that was leading it there. In Laing’s version, nature’s colors are muted, as if the imperialist subtext to Heysen’s drawing has had its effect, draining the real landscape of its life. But Laing should not be taken as only a critical revisionist. Her work shows placidity and quiet belonging, too. It was created during a period of national reconciliation that reached a high point in 2008, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered an apology to Australia’s Aboriginal people for their long mistreatment during the colonial era.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0