"This exhibition has been 50 years in the making."
— Senior curator Elspeth Pitt
The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra will display the complete series of 20 monumental tapestries commissioned by Australian artist Arthur Boyd for the first time. The tapestries, created between 1970 and 1974, have largely been in storage for five decades.
Key Details
- The tapestries were commissioned by Boyd in the late 1960s from the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre in Portugal.
- They translate Boyd's pastels depicting Saint Francis of Assisi into woven form.
- Each tapestry measures 2.5 meters by 3.4 meters and contains between 4 and 8 million individual stitches.
- The works were acquired by the NGA in 1975, seven years before the gallery opened.
- Boyd died in 1999 without seeing the full series displayed.
"The weaving is all done by hand with no instruments."
— Vera Fino, workshop director