Kids audio tour

'From thunder and summer rains on the high South African veld to a day’s work in Sydney. A terracotta clay and water work made with a fast hand. I make one part of the image, and the forces of nature make the rest. The macro-scale and the micro-scale, deliberation and chance. I walk away with bats flying high over the Domain.' Richard Long 2011 Richard Long has made the act of walking in remote and extraordinary landscapes into an art form. It is during these walks that he arranges natural objects such as rocks into geometric forms which he then photographs. ‘Southern gravity’ was commissioned by John Kaldor specially for the John Kaldor Family Gallery. Long’s mud drawings relate to the water lines poured over rock shelves that he often makes on his walks. Like the artist’s stone works, ‘Southern gravity’ is based on a geometric shape but the application of the mud is done with such an intensely energetic movement – akin to a ritual dance – that striking traces of the artist’s hand gestures are left behind.

Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have produced photographs of industrial and domestic architecture. Their ordered images (which they call ‘typologies’) of blast furnaces, cooling towers, silos and workers’ houses record the monuments of a rapidly diminishing industrial era. However, the Bechers were equally driven by aesthetic considerations, with photographs of like objects assembled into groups where precise lighting and tonal density give equivalent weight to each visual element. The Bechers’ typological practice has been associated with the formal and serial repetition espoused by minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s. Despite these connections, however, their photography has sat largely outside trends in art practice, the artists maintaining a rigorously systematic approach to their chosen subject matter. The Bechers belong to a distinguished tradition of early 20th-century German photography exemplified by the work of August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, all of whom contributed

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video installation in the early 1960s. Associated with the international conceptual movement Fluxus, Paik regularly collaborated with other Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas. In 1976 John Kaldor invited Paik and his collaborator, the cellist Charlotte Moorman to create a Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia. As part of the project Moorman played the ‘TV cello’. Made from three televisions removed from their sets so that their inner workings can be seen, with an attached cello bridge, tailpiece and strings forming a cello-like instrument. ‘TV Buddha’ was also made in Sydney in 1976 using an old wooden Maitreya (Buddha of the future) from the Kaldor collection. ‘Kaldor candle’ was made in 1996 for John Kaldor, who remained friends with Paik until the artist’s death in 2006. Both ‘TV Buddha’ and ‘Kaldor candle’ employ a conceptual use of video – first developed by Paik – in which a camera and a monitor loop in real time, blurring the object–subject distinc

Adopting both historical and contemporary motifs – from the baroque to glossy magazine advertisements – Jeff Koons’s work disrupts the distinctions between high and low art forms. ‘White terrier’ was the model for Koons’s floral sculpture ‘Puppy’ 1995, a Kaldor Public Art Project that stood 12.5 metres high on the lawn of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

Christo began working with the landscape as a student employed to beautify the landscape of his native Bulgaria as seen from the Orient Express. He later moved to Paris and associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a group of artists who used found materials and responded to everyday situations in their work. Christo’s ambition for larger projects was established when he moved to New York in 1964 with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude. In 1960 John Kaldor invited Christo to Australia, a visit which resulted in ‘Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia 1968-69', Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first major environmental work and one of the most ambitious land-art events in the world at the time. It was during his visit to Australia that Christo wrapped two Australian eucalypts to make ‘Two Wrapped Trees’.

First drawn by: Kazuko Miyamoto First installation: Panza di Biumo residence, Varese, Italy, June 1980      Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are executed by professional draughtspeople from sets of instructions generated by the artist. LeWitt emphasised the idea or concept of an artwork over its visual realisation, hence his assertion that his instructions are themselves the work of art. ‘Wall drawing #337’ and ‘Wall drawing #338’ exemplify this process: both works are drawn by professional draughtspeople following LeWitt’s instructions. The artist’s methodology has been likened to that of a composer: the works are manifested by others, and no single drawing is ever the definitive version. In a 1971 interview LeWitt commented: ‘I try to make the plan specific enough so that it comes out more or less how I want it, but general enough that [the draughtspeople] have the freedom to interpret. It’s as though I am writing of piece of music and somebody else is going to play it on the piano.’

Through photographs, objects and installations Simryn Gill considers how we experience a sense of place and how both personal and cultural histories inform our present moment. Her work also suggests how culture becomes naturalised, an almost invisible part of our physical environment. Gill often works with books, narratives and texts that provide a framework through which we order and describe the world around us. 'Forest', has the appearance of an etymological proposition where Gill quite literally takes printed words back to roots. Not their roots, as in the source of their meaning, but rather the growing, evolving, decaying nature from which the raw material for books is derived. Gill tore up the fibrous matter of book pages and grafted fragile strips of text into the natural environment. Attached to tropical plants, they look like natural forms, becoming exuberant banana florescences, dangling aerial roots on fig trees, mangroves emerging from mudflats, variegations on the leaves of lush tropical foliage

In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact. More recently he has made carvings of the animate and inanimate conceived and realised at a ratio of 1:1. 'Killing time' is the most ambitious work that Swallow has made to date and is likely to remain so for some time due to the onerous and time-consuming physical task of working in such detail on this scale. It was the centrepiece of Swallow's solo exhibition at the Australian Pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale. While 'Killing time' visually recalls 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and even the work of such a virtuoso illusionist woodcarver as Grinling Gibbons, the subject matter is derived from Swallow’s pe

For the past 30 years Tony Cragg has consistently produced original ideas and a remarkable diversity of forms employing a vast array of materials and techniques. It is difficult to characterise his work within a specific style or art movement. In the early 1970s a new generation of British sculptors celebrated a certain freedom from the snares of style which had bedevilled their immediate predecessors. Under the influence of conceptual art, a pluralist environment in which almost anything could happen began to flourish. Conceptual artists proclaimed the subservience of material form to content, thereby allowing any material or method to be employed in their service. Some artists took this dictum to devalue the material properties of ‘fine art’ and began privileging media associated with popular culture, including text, photography and video over more traditional materials. Cragg, by contrast, was among those who translated this freedom into an infinite possibility for systems and material processes with whic

Callum Morton’s sculptures combine incisive social observation, ideas about urban design and contemporary living, and an interest in the legacy of minimal sculpture. ‘Motormouth’ continues his consideration of the intersections between public and private space and in particular the ‘non-spaces’ of urban design such as freeways, shopping centres, service stations, cinemas and convenience stores. These are the generic buildings and sites that are designed as transit zones between destinations or as backdrops to their intended function. We don’t usually notice their architecture except as an indicator of this function. Morton’s sculptural versions reintroduce narratives that are at odds with the social design of these places and yet are somehow entirely appropriate for the setting. ‘Motormouth’ is a sculpture of two freeways, scaled 1:10 and perfect in detail down to the dirty realism of their distressed, water-stained concrete marked with graffiti. It appears to be a realistic model but is in fact an elaborate

Guilio Paolini came to international note as a leading member of the arte povera group in Italy in 1967. Like the others, he uses found materials and often introduces historical and literary references into his imagery. Works such as this have a poetic quality that is common with arte povera and yet there is a strong conceptual and critical streak that is not normally associated with the group. Many of his installations directly critique assumptions about art history and play with the rules of perspective to disclose their paradoxical illusionism. ‘L’altra figura’ (the other figure) is a deceptively simple play on the classical theme. The two heads raised on plinths to the height of a modestly sized viewer are identical plaster casts of a Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic bust. The busts show the heads slightly at an angle to the body, their faces turned to reflect each other precisely. This slightly sideways glance lends a degree of animation to what would otherwise be a static mirroring. It is as if the

'Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss' is the title of each of two works, one painting and one floor installation. It is not uncommon for Kiefer to use the same titles again and again. This is because of his sustained commitment to certain themes that he pursues over many years. These two works represent two such themes in Kiefer's development and although they look very different as objects they are two sides of one key idea in his mature work. The horizon in Kiefer's work is always more than a landscape feature, it is highly charged symbolically. 'Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe' 1984-86 in the Gallery's collection includes a propeller which has the potential to fly over the horizon transcending the boundary between heaven and earth. In many of Kiefer's paintings and sculptures there are ladders, wings, rockets, Ziggurats, snakes and rainbows that all in some way suggest the idea of transcendence. The broken stairs in 'Von den Verlorenen gerührt...' correspond to th

Purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation in 1994, 'Woman of Venice VII' is the first sculpture by Alberto Giacometti to enter a public art collection in Australia. It is one of nine bronze figures that were created as 'states' of a single figure modelled in clay on a single armature over a period of about three weeks and cast in plaster by the artist's brother, Diego. The hands held at the side of the figure's broad body emphasise the corporeality of the figure and recall Giacometti's early experiments with female spoon-like forms. As in other works in this series the tension created between the heavy wedge-shaped pedestal and the figure's tiny head endows the piece with a sense of the visionary that the artist favoured. The heavily textured quality of this work and original patination make this one of Giacometti's most distinctive and successful female figures. This work perfectly embodies Giacometti's ambivalent attitude towards women whom he idolised but whom he also found suffocating and

Noh robes are the ultimate statement in quality, luxury and skilful weaving. This one is an 'atsuita', a robe used as an outer robe primarily for male roles. It is boldly decorated with alternating squares of eddy or whirlpool ('uzumoyo') motifs, and dragon roundels. In addition the backgrounds within the squares are enriched with trellis and 'Bishamon' diaper pattern; and the ikat dyed warps are arranged to form blocks of colour. The result is a superbly vibrant and impressive design. Asian Art Department, AGNSW, August 2006.

On loan courtesy Colin McDonald

Chinese scholar’s set with inkstone, brush rest, ceramic water dropper and seal

Benign but fearsome, this pair of unusually large and meticulously detailed figures exemplifies ceramic technique in Tang China. The facial features and elaborate costumes of these tomb guardians are realised with a convincing naturalism combined with iconographic stylisation. Their dynamic and dramatic poses are characteristic of figures that were placed in the four corners of the tomb to ward off evil spirits. Guardian figures such as these, termed 'lokapalas' or guardian kings, became assimilated into the popular concept of the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhism, or 'tian wang'. The demonic appearance of this pair is heightened by their flamboyant armour with its flaring epaulettes and prominent breastplates. Also typical is their heroic pose: by standing on or trampling a demon or animal the guardians demonstrate their power over natural elements and evil forces. Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 250.

This painting by Jeffrey Smart, perhaps the finest masterpiece of his later years, is a perfect example of his habit of finding motifs delivered without warning. For, given the calculation and precision typifying his long career as an artist, Smart has never quite known what is in store to appeal to his compositional interests driving around the industrial estates of Arezzo, or walking through a flea market in Rome, or a back street in Sydney. His process has a curious connection with a 19th-century method inculcated by French artist Lecoq de Boisbaudran as a kind of competition with the seduction of photography. Students were encouraged to look at a motif for a few seconds, turn their backs on it, commit it to memory, and let imagination go to work. Whistler adopted this practice in France and England; and in Australia half a century later Nolan developed his own instinctive version of it to spectacular effect. Smart differed from those two however in his slow, deliberate construction of a scaffolding to ho

Five bells was my first commission to paint in situ to cover a wall … I didn’t hesitate. I brushed a line around the core theme, the seed-burst, the life-burst, the sea-harbour, the source of life. Inside and around this core, I painted images drawn from metaphors and similes in [Kenneth] Slessor’s poem of our harbour city, and from my own emotional and physical involvement with the harbour, and with my young family in Watsons Bay … I wanted to show the Harbour as a movement, a sea suck, and the sound of the water as though I am part of the sea ... The painting says directly what I wanted to say: ‘I am in the sea-harbour, and the sea-harbour is in me’. John Olsen, 1999

Nolan is one of Australia's most respected and internationally celebrated painters having travelled and exhibited extensively throughout the world during his long career. Largely self-taught by way of repeated visits to the State Library and Gino Nibbi's legendary book store in Melbourne, Nolan discovered the art of Miró, Klee and Picasso and immersed himself in the writings of Blake, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and DH Lawrence. Ned Kelly was an Australian folk hero many decades before Nolan took up his cause. Nolan's fascination with Kelly developed from stories told by his grandfather, a trooper who had hunted down the fugitive bushranger in 1880. 'The camp' is one of the original, seminal series of works depicting the life and deeds of this antipodean bandit, which Nolan painted at Sunday and John Reed's house 'Heide', in 1946-47. 'The camp' refers to the moment in the story of Kelly's exploits, just before his gang's ambush at Stringybark Creek in rural Victoria, where three policemen sent to appreh