MELBOURNE.- Heide Museum of Modern Art announced highlights from its 2021 program, celebrating the museum's 40th anniversary with a diverse range of exhibitions including the first Australian museum exhibition of celebrated British artist Bruce Munro, a major retrospective of renowned Australian modernist Sidney Nolan, and important surveys of respected Australian artists Robert Owen and Margel Hinder. 2021 will also see the opening of a much-anticipated Healing Garden within the Heide grounds.

Next year’s program builds on the museum’s longstanding commitment to support and present the work of women artists with a significant retrospective of Australian sculptor Margel Hinder in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian premiere of an award-winning video installation by Polish artist Agnieszka Polska, and the first career survey exhibition by contemporary artist Stanislava Pinchuk. Heide will also stage the first survey in twenty years of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen and a major Sidney Nolan exhibition at the end of the year to mark the museum’s 40th anniversary on 12 November.

In addition to the exhibition program, Heide with the support of the Shine On Foundation will open the much anticipated new Healing Garden in 2021. Inspired by Heide founder Sunday Reed’s profound love for her garden and designed by the award-winning landscape architects Openwork in collaboration with the Heide gardening team, the Healing Garden draws on the curative qualities of plants and the natural environment to provide a place for relaxation, joy, and rejuvenation for all visitors, but particularly for vulnerable communities. A public opening is slated for early 2021 once work is completed.

Lesley Harding, Artistic Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art said: “It is exciting to present the 2021 program, which both celebrates the past 40 years and looks ahead to a bright future for Heide. We have planned a range of thoughtful, poetic, and inspiring exhibitions that showcase the work of leading Australian and international artists, including the first significant retrospective of Australia’s ground-breaking modernist sculptor, Margel Hinder, and a career-long survey of respected Australian artist Robert Owen. We also look forward to inviting the public to enjoy our inaugural summer festival, and the newly designed Healing Garden—a soothing place for sensory experiences with programs for communities with a diversity of needs.”

HEIDE SUMMER FESTIVAL | 16 January to 7 March 2021
Heide’s much-loved sculpture park will be activated over the summer months with an outdoor event series designed to support local performing artists, youth bands, and cultural festivals. The series has been supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and highlights of the nine-week program include:

· The Melbourne International Jazz Festival will curate a series of jazz performances by Victorian-based jazz artists across three Sundays in January.

· Over two weekends in February, Songlines will present First Nations musicians, dancers and storytellers and Midsumma will curate a weekend in February celebrating and supporting LGBTQIA+ communities and artists.




· The summer festival will end with a Trubacki Orkestar, performing authentic contemporary Balkan brass music from the rich traditions of Serbia, Macedonia, and beyond.

BLUE OVER TIME: ROBERT OWEN—A SURVEY | 27 February to 23 May 2021
Heide Galleries
The first museum survey of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen’s work in Melbourne will be presented in the main exhibition space, Heide Galleries. Grounded in geometry and abstraction, Owen’s striking works are inspired by his diverse interests—encompassing philosophy and psychology, science and mathematics, music and literature—and reflect his incessant curiosity about the world. This exhibition will explore Owen’s varied 60-year career and feature new and more recent paintings and sculptural installations.

Heide X Alpha60 X Patricia Piccinini: HUGS | 27 February to 14 March 2021
Heide Modern
This pop-up exhibition in Heide Modern features a new collaboration between Australian fashion label Alpha60 and acclaimed artist Patricia Piccinini. Teaming up for the first time, Alpha60 founders Georgie and Alex Cleary have created a series of whimsical, inspiring and emotive textiles based on Piccinini’s works, under the collective title Hugs – artwork/keepsakes emblematic of nurture and warmth, two themes that live at the heart of Piccinini’s complex and captivating sculptural forms.

PHOTO 2021: AGNIESZKA POLSKA: THE NEW SUN | 20 February to 20 June 2021
Kerry Gardner and Andrew Myer Project Gallery
Heide will present the Australian premiere of Agnieszka Polska’s award-winning video work, The New Sun, during the inaugural PHOTO 2021. Polska is an innovative Polish artist who investigates society’s shared experiences of environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. 'The New Sun' features a projection of the sun personified as an animated character bearing witness to the Earth’s increasing environmental calamity.

STANISLAVA PINCHUK: TERRA DATA | 20 March to 20 June 2021
Heide Modern
Ukrainian-Australian artist Stanislava Pinchuk is one of the most intriguing contemporary artists working today. This exhibition showcases powerful drawings that capture the changing topographies of war through data mapping, as well as terrazzo sculptures containing the detritus left behind by conflict—fragments of tiles, shotgun shells, SIM cards, plastics and tar. In her work, Pinchuk plots both the physical features of the land as well as the more abstract yet enduring residues of trauma.

MARGEL HINDER: MODERN IN MOTION | 30 June to 10 October 2021
Heide Modern
The first dedicated retrospective of the work of vanguard modernist sculptor Margel Hinder. Revealing one of the most dynamic yet overlooked sculptural practices to have developed in Australia during the mid-twentieth century, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion explores the artist’s expansive creative vision and sense of the world in perpetual movement.

BRUCE MUNRO: FROM SUNRISE ROAD | 12 June to 17 October 2021
Heide Galleries and Sculpture Park
Light is an essential element of the remarkable practice of British artist Bruce Munro, best known for his immersive, large-scale installations inspired largely by his interest in shared human experience. In 2021 at Heide, Munro will present his first museum exhibition in Australia, combining spectacular indoor and outdoor experiential artworks with intimate story-pieces. Bruce Munro: From Sunrise Road reveals the depth of the artist’s practice and the breadth of his sources, from the personal and literary to the philosophical and spiritual. At once contemplative, playful and thought-provoking, the exhibition will offer an unforgettable interactive experience that engages the senses and enriches the mind.

SIDNEY NOLAN: SEARCH FOR PARADISE | 30 October 2021 to 13 February 2022
Heide Galleries
One of Australia’s leading artists of the twentieth century, Sidney Nolan is synonymous with Heide, which for him was a Garden of Eden that he later saw as a season in hell. Nolan’s creativity was fueled by a life-long fascination with the elusive notion of paradise and the consequences of its loss. From his nostalgia for St Kilda, his childhood heaven, to his explorations of the Australian landscape and restless travels abroad, Sidney Nolan: Search for Paradise examines one of the artist’s deepest impulses and the journey of self-discovery it engendered.