Fortuna

Fortuna
Lively Japanese prints dating from the 1920s and '30s are showing in the University Art Gallery as part of an exhibition that features recent gifts to the University Art Collection.

Couples dancing western style and Kobe street scenes that contrast the traditional and the modern are the subject of the four colourful woodcuts by Kawanishi Hide.

Bought last year with funds from the Morrissey Bequest, they complement four others by Kawanishi that are part of the University Collection.

Along with many of the works in the University's Japanese print collection, now numbering well over 200, Kawanishi's help document the sosaku-hanga creative print movement of 1910-1950 which concentrated on the originality of the individual artist, University Collection Curator Sioux Garside said.

But diversity is a theme of the current exhibition which includes young Melbourne artist Kylie Stillman's imaginative carving of a tree into a stack of old Encyclopedia Britannica's, along with an ancient painted pottery vessel from the Chinese Neolithic period.

Two of Australia's most prominent contemporary artists known for their abstraction, Marion Borgelt and Aida Tomescu, are represented by works they've donated to the Collection.

Tomescu's painting and drawings are strongly expressionistic while Borgelt's painting