Peter Atkins
Dana's Bangle 1995
oil and enamel on tarpaulin
215 x 205 cm

Imants Tillers
Drift of Destiny 1994
oilstick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 120 canvas boards
304.8 x 381 cm

Mike Parr
Intergration 3 (Leg Spinal)
film still from performance,
Sydney, 1975, Rules and Displacement Actvities Part 2

Simeon Nelson
Landscope (The Machine in the Garden) 1993
oxidised steel, water, algae, duckweed, larvae
240 x 420 x 420 cm

Mounted in 1996-1997 by Sherman Galleries. Co-curated by William Wright, Curatorial Director of Sherman Galleries (former Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney and Assistant Director (Professional) of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) and Takeshi Kanazawa, Professor, Seian University, Kyoto (formerly Deputy Director / Chief Curator of the Hara Museum, Tokyo), and organised by Gene Sherman, Director, Sherman Galleries.

Touring twelve of Australia's most important mid-generation contemporary artists:

Peter Atkins
Gold medallist, VIII Triennale-India, 1994

Gordon Bennett
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship, 1991

Bill Henson
Venice Biennale, Australian representative 1995

Robert Hunter
Australian Artists Creative Fellowship, Australia Council, 1992

Janet Laurence
Australia Council Studio Grant, Tokyo, 1988
Commissioned artist for the key site in the Olympic precinct at Homebush Bay, 1998

Hilarie Mais
Australia Council Fellowship, 1993 & Blake Prize, Sydney, 1994

Simeon Nelson
Australia Council Fellowship, New York, 1994

Bronwyn Oliver
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship, 1994

Mike Parr
Antipodean Currents, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995

Julie Rrap
Residency, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Grenoble, 1988

Imants Tillers
Venice Biennale, Australian representative 1986 Grand Prize, Osaka Painting Triennale, 1993

John Young
Antipodean Currents, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995

Systems End toured through four important venues in Asia:

Oxy Gallery, Osaka, Japan 19 April - 19 May 1996 1996 Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan 31 May - 28 July 1996 Dong-Ah Gallery, Seoul, Korea 14 August - 4 September 1996 Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan 31 October, 1996 - 16 March 1997

WHERE SYSTEMS END
by William Wright
Excerpt from the catalogue Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia
Australia is a country at the cross-roads of its social and cultural future. Its dominant systems of belief, once considered absolute, are in a process of relativisation, where once established credos and modalities take their new place as just some among a proliferation of others. It is this human and conceptual process of assimilation, rejection, and transformation that is characteristic of the new creative life in this contemporary society. The consequences for artists are profound and irreversible; the widening rupture in the fabric of Australia's post-colonial life - and its live arts - has extended to reveal a welter of other informing potentialities at work. We are at the cusp of an as yet to be consummated creative future, where systems end, transform into new and richer expressive complexities and new paradigms emerge. The twelve artists included in the exhibition Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia are some, among others, who occupy an important role in this transformation.

Australia is one of the most recently evolved of modern human societies. For the greater part of the two centuries following British settlement, it has been one of the most isolated of the world's populations, a land without borders to other lands, a people without neighbours. No other society in recent history has created itself in so short a period and so far from its originating roots.

Australia's present reality is one of rapid transformation, from a people once beset by monolithic notions of national identity and race to one (with growing ethnic pluralism, a vital and expanding Aboriginal culture, and increasing economic links with Asia) embracing a major change in national self-awareness. There is a growing realisation that Australia's destiny is in Asia, and that the creative complexity of its increasingly multicultural population will determine the future sum of its capabilities as a nation.