1967

By 1967, cigarette companies were sponsoring many sectors of the community (reflecting the era), including Geelong Gallery’s exhibition Rodin and his contemporaries. 

This exhibition featured a display of sculptures and drawings by French artist Auguste Rodin, as well as works by other French artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier and Aristide Maillol. The exhibition was ground-breaking, attracting 4,812 visitors to Geelong Gallery in only three weeks.  

The 1967 recipient of the Corio 5 Star Whiskey prize was Sydney Ball for his iconic piece Canzon nama, one of our favourites here at Geelong Gallery.

Canzon nama belongs to Sydney Ball’s Persian series, a collection of abstract compositions developed between 1966 and 1968 driven by the ideals of colour, line and proportion. Works from this series aim to provide sensorial impressions of Middle Eastern architectural structures, rather than their figurative representation.

Ball belongs to a generation of Australian painters associated with the hard-edge painting style, with his works emphasising the flatness of pictorial surface and visible junctures between areas of high-keyed colour.