February 6, 2024
Visitors to the Kingaroy Regional Art Gallery can get a rare glimpse at most (but not all) of the South Burnett Regional Council’s permanent art collection this month.
All three of the Gallery’s exhibition areas are displaying artworks that have been collected by the SBRC and its predecessor councils (Nanango, Kingaroy, Wondai and Murgon) over the past 50 years.
Most of the artworks were purchased from artists who lived and worked in the region, but some have been acquired through art competitions and some have been gifted to Council by residents.
The complete collection runs to more than 200 works, and the current exhibition displays about 140 of them.
Long-time residents will find several perennial favourites in this month’s display but are also likely to find others they have never seen before.
The collection is normally housed in the art gallery’s safe – a former bank vault – and while individual works have occasionally been shown at the gallery, the complete collection hasn’t been exhibited in more than a decade.
At Friday night’s official opening, Cr Danita Potter thanked the gallery’s volunteers for looking after the collection so well and preparing this month’s exhibition for display.
southburnett.com.au CEO Dafyd Martindale also spoke briefly about the need to catalogue the collection.
He said Council’s Arts, Culture and Heritage Advisory Committee had discussed the necessity of properly cataloguing the collection, and developing policies to handle the acquisition and disposal of works in it.
He also hoped that at some point in the future the complete collection could be put online so residents and visitors could view it whenever they wished.
The exhibition will remain on display from 10:00am to 4:00pm Tuesday to Fridays, and 9:00am to 1:00pm on Saturdays, until February 29.
Admission to view it is free.
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