Behind the scenes at the Art Gallery of South Australia
Step behind the curtain at the Art Gallery of South Australia as centuries-old, priceless works are prepared and displayed meticulously and lovingly by the team behind the scenes.
The Art Gallery of South Australia’s doors are about to open, and soon, a symphony made from the hushed whispers of visitors will reverberate around the walls as gallery-goers discover or revisit priceless artworks on show.
But on this particular morning, the upstairs galleries are off limits to visitors and instead, in here, there’s nothing hushed about the shrill power tools that scream out, interrupting conversations and trains of thought as they are used to construct the next exhibition that will soon take over the gallery spaces.
The doors are closed to the public, but AGSA has invited SALIFE behind the scenes to witness the transformation of these bare gallery walls into the much-heralded Reimagining the Renaissance exhibition that ran last year.
Three members of AGSA’s install team; Ken Orchard, Dan Schutt and Harry Sadler.
Unlike the rest of the building’s well-ordered rooms, upstairs this morning, there’s chaos – albeit, organised chaos. Foam pool noodles are lying on the floor, acting as careful buffers between the artworks and the floor. Green lasers shine their lights that stretch up and across walls, reaching to the ceiling – a straight-line guide to that all-important perfect hang.
Pieces of paper with exacting measurements penned on them are taped to the walls and the floor is covered in boxes, packing tape and ladders.
In the corner of the room, a folding desk is a makeshift office for AGSA’s curator of international art pre-1980, Tansy Curtin.
This will be Tansy’s workspace for two weeks, where she will play conductor to the installation team working around her. The process begins with Tansy and her voracious appetite for the stories held within the collection.
“I just love getting deep in the research and telling the stories about all of these beautiful works of art,” Tansy says. “Every time I get a work of art out of storage, it’s still so exciting.”
Artlab conservators, Matia Kubik and Rosie Heysen, consolidating gold leaf on two 16th century Prophets made in Antwerp.
The adventure begins with work selection at one of the gallery’s off-site storage buildings (the location is top secret – we can’t tease it out of Tansy – but she says it’s akin to any art museum store: “It’s humble from the outside, you’d never know what it was”).
“Then you open up the storage building and there are racks of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts. It’s a wonderful experience and very different to viewing artworks in a curated experience.”
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The concept of the Reimagining the Renaissance was to explore the Northern and English Renaissance periods, showcasing celebrated Italian masters.
“It’s really about a change in the way we look at things. We’re telling a much bigger story about social changes and changes in the role of the church.”
Installation officer Daniel Schutt works on constructing coin holders for the exhibition
Tansy looks after about 1000 works and she’s curated them into 170 paintings, sculptures, embroidery, drawings and decorative arts to tell the story of what the Renaissance, which dates from circa 1400-1600 AD, means in this interpretation of social change.
She explains this in front of stoic hundreds-year-old portraits of long-gone subjects clothed in heavy garments.
We’re in the politics and power section of the exhibition, which displays the role of portraiture in changing the power dynamic.
Across the room, there’s a painting of King Henry VIII next to his preferred wife Jane Seymour and, next to her, the reason for his favouritism – his only son, Edward VI.
Curator Tansy Curtin in front of Marcus Gheeraerts’s, Magdalen Poultney, later Lady Aston c.1620.
Many of the pieces have spent years in AGSA storage and some needed a little rejuvenation work, most notably two 1480 marble angels from the school of Tuscan sculptor Mino da Fiesole. These carved marble angels were acquired for AGSA by H.D. Molesworth, a keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1950.
“When I brought them out of storage, they were quite dirty,” Tansy explains. “At one point, we realised they’d had some kind of waxy substance put on the surface to kind of make it consistent, but over the years, the dirt had just been sucked in.”
The team at Artlab Australia prepared the statues with a gentle steam-cleaning of the surface and secured a crack along one of them.
Once the works have been selected and spruced, next on the agenda for Tansy is the room’s layout and ways in which it will tell the story she wants to convey.
Ken getting the measurement just right.
First, she sketches it all out on a piece of paper and then physically lays it out in the gallery.
“In my head, I’m working out how I think groupings will work, but then it’s just getting into the space and there’s a lot that’s done by eye. We lay everything down on blocks in here and measure it all out.”
The final layout won’t be quite so final – some precious drawings can only be on show for a number of weeks, so these will have to be swapped around.
“Some (artworks) can only be on display for eight weeks because they’re very light sensitive. Even with a very low light level, they start to get affected, so they have to be rested for a minimum of two years.”
AGSA installation team leader, Harry Sadler, says the process of hanging an exhibition in a space is slow and methodical.
“We really take our time; you can’t replace the works you’re dealing with, so you can’t make mistakes,” Harry says. “Sometimes you hang a work and it might look 100mm too high or 100mm too low, so you’re moving it up and down. It can come down to a few millimetres sometimes.”
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Most of the install team have their own artistic pursuits away from the gallery, and for Harry, it’s photography.
St Roch c.1510-30 has a rest on a pillow before the exhibition opens.
He studied under renowned Australian photographer Max Pam – an artist in AGSA’s collection. He’s previously worked as a furniture maker and before that, as the studio manager at Tjala Arts on the APY Lands.
Harry is quite relaxed this morning because this exhibition doesn’t come with too many surprises, but when it comes time for more contemporary shows such as the Adelaide Biennial and the Ramsay Art Prize, they have to get more creative.
He once helped install 1500 spears in the shape of a giant tornado cascading down a 12-metre ceiling for an Australian First Nations exhibition held in Switzerland.
Installation officer Daniel Schutt sits at his desk, concentrating on the detailed task of soldering metal into clasps to hold a collection of coins.
If something needs to be mounted at AGSA, Dan’s the go-to. From his workshop, he creates all manner of fabrications to hold work ready to be exhibited – there was one year he made 427 mounts.
Dan was behind the mounts bearing 85 kilograms and 65 kilograms respectively from those marble angels.
They’re in safe hands – Dan works with a six-to-one ratio for public displays, so if something weighs 60 kilograms, he’ll make mounts to hold 600 kilograms and then tests them vigorously.
“I load it up with weights for a few days – I’ll stand on it, jump up and down on it,” Dan says.
Harry with the finished product.
Dan started his working life as an A-class machinist, moved into forklift driving and then decided visual arts was for him and earned himself a degree in art, architecture and design, graduating with Honours in jewellery and design and later did his postgrad Masters.
“I liked making jewellery because the workshop was so close to being in a machine shop – without the noise.”
Dan’s worked as a technician at JamFactory and has his own business, Von Schutt & Co, but he still loves being part of the install team and the atmosphere at AGSA.
“I am here for and am passionate about the art,” Dan says. “I love working with talented artists across diverse media and disciplines – it’s a language of love.
“I enjoy being the backbone of the arts industry; without the install team, there is no show. I liken it to a rock star – the front man is not a front man without the rest of the band.”
As installation officer Ken Orchard chats, he pulls out a tape measure, spirit level and consults the green lasers to hang one of the exhibition’s sketches. Ken, a decorated practicing artist whose work featured in the inaugural Adelaide Biennial at AGSA in 1990, counts himself lucky to have worked with Egyptian treasures from The Louvre, landscapes from French Impressionism masters and works from the Turner from the Tate exhibition.
Artlab conservator, Abby Maxwell-Bowen restoring School of Mino da Fiesole, Angels c.1480
“Working on the Turner exhibition in 2013 was an incredible privilege,” Ken says. “At the end of the show, with permission from the Tate curator, Piers Townsend, I was able to look through Turner’s sketchbook.
“The thick sketchbook volume was full of Turner’s provisional watercolours and sketches from one of his walking tours and I realised at the time that the viewing of it was a unique experience. It was about 30 minutes of visual bliss.”
Rounding out the team is Rubyn Kincross, who spent his first five months at AGSA working in security before moving into the install team in what was meant to be a temporary move – that was 15 years ago.
One of Rubyn’s highlights during his time was the installation of sculpture Patricia Piccinini’s Big Mother.
“I was given the important task of styling her hair using chopsticks to ensure the hair was not damaged – it’s not as though we use a brush,” Rubyn says.
“You feel honoured to be working on such an important work of art that celebrates the human form. There is incredible pride in the way in which we handle the work to honour the artists who have created them.”
The article originally featured in the September 2024 SALIFE magazine.
