The Art Gallery of Ballarat is recognised for the extent and strength of its Australian and colonial works. What it may not be as well known for is an amazing array of medieval manuscripts and Orthodox religious iconography which also form part of its collection.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
DEËSIS: Prayer and Image is an exhibition highlighting the religious icons from the gallery and on loan. Composed mostly of images sourced from Russian churches and worshippers, it’s a timely show coinciding with the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolutions.
Gallery director Gordon Morrison specialises in iconography, and he says many of the images outside of Russia today were smuggled from the country in the face of impending destruction by the new Soviet government, which demolished or dynamited around 70,000 churches and monasteries between coming to power in 1917 and the failing of the USSR towards the end of the 20th Century.
While religion was never specifically outlawed in the Soviet Union, it was a state directive to annihilate, suppress and purge all ‘backwards practices and superstitions’ and replace them with ‘scientific atheism’.
However religion remained a strong core of Russian life, and many emigres were allowed to bring icons as they left their homeland in lieu of cash.
There is no standing collection of Byzantine and Orthodox icons in a public Australian gallery. Mr Morrison says following discussions with leading Australian collector John McCarthy in the light of the successful 2014 show EIKON: Icons of the Orthodox Christian World, a number of works came to the gallery through the Commonwealth Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
At the same time a Ballarat bequest enabled the purchase of some other works to complement the new acquisitions. ‘Old Believer’ brass icons, used by a sect of the Russian Orthodox church resistant to 17th Century reforms, were purchased. The works were often carried hidden by sect members to avoid detection, which could be punished by flogging with the knout, torture, exile or execution.
Included in the exhibition is a rare Ethiopian work, distinctive in its difference from the Russian by the more stylised and cartoon-like nature of the illustration, which relates it to the art work of the gallery’s medieval scripts as Coptic priests influenced Irish monk’s work.
DEËSIS: Prayer and Image is running at AGB until September 29. Entrance is free.
Around 70,000 churches and monasteries were destroyed between 1917 and the 1970s
- Gordon Morrison, AGB director
