Pet Thang
1991
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Photography
Set of six colour photographs
109.5 × 79.5 cm
79.7 × 109.7 cm
79.8 × 109.7 cm
79.7 × 109.7 cm
109.7 ×79.6 cm
79.7 × 109.7 cm
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Hyperrealist and realistic images are often combined within the photographic and film work of Tracey Moffatt (1960, Brisbane, Australia) in a darkly suggestive narrative style that has become the artist’s trademark. Her work conflates references from cinema and theatre, television and video art, comics and advertisements, art history, and high and folk culture in a condensed form. Moffatt adopts a surrealist approach to photography and demonstrates even the most prosaic photograph, filtered through the prism of a hyperrealist sensibility, may easily be detached from its usual framework and endowed with a new role, in the most irreverent way.
In the six images that constitute Pet Thang (1991), the element of unorthodox eroticism, often present in the work of Moffatt, is rendered in a dream-like manner, as a naked woman and a sheep float together in the darkness. Warm lighting, the soft curves of the woman’s torso, and the sheep's fluffy, smooth fleece intensify the sense of tenderness already conjured by the work’s title – or at least by its first word. Ambiguity, consistently dominant in Moffatt’s narratives, tests certainties here, once again. Is it the element of tenderness that prevails, or perhaps its contestation, or even the viewing of the female body as an object (a thang)?
Tracey Moffatt was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1960 to an Aboriginal mother. She lives and works in Sydney and New York. An experimental photographer and filmmaker, one of the most celebrated contemporary artists to emerge from the Australian art scene in recent decades, Moffatt transformed photographic practice in the late 20th century. She first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy was selected for the official competition section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. In 1997, she participated in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale – the same year, a major solo exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York consolidated her international reputation. Extensive presentations of her work have taken place in major museums and institutions worldwide (selection): Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014); MoMA, New York (2012); Spazio Oberdan, Milan (2006); Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (2004); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003–2004). She has taken part in the Biennales of Gwangju (South Korea), Prague, Sao Paulo, Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), Singapore, and Sydney. In 2017, she represented her country at the Venice Biennale – the only indigenous Australian artist to have achieved this since 1997. Her works can be found in all public collections of modern and contemporary art in Australia, as well as in many private and public collections around the world (selection): Centre Pompidou (Paris), Goetz Collection (Munich), New York Public Library (New York), Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea (Turin), Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York), Baroness Marion Lambert Collection (Switzerland), Brooklyn Museum (New York), DZ-Bank (Frankfurt), Guggenheim Museum (New York), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebaek, Denmark), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (Tokyo), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston), MoMA (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tate Gallery (London), The National Museum of Photography (Copenhagen).