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A tribute to Jeffrey Smart’s role as the painter of urban isolation and atomisation, Greg Weight’s photograph of the artist – in which the sweeping curve of the tunnel offsets the vertical of the solitary, substantial figure standing on the bitumen – reprises elements of Smart’s best-known work, Cahill Expressway 1962. Not long after he painted Cahill Expressway, Smart moved permanently to Italy. In 2011, he said that might, perhaps, again be able to live in Australia, which had changed a great deal since he left, ‘but I wouldn't like living where the light is so high up in the sky. I would live in Melbourne or Tasmania where the light is lower, like it is here.’
Greg Weight opened his own photographic studio in 1968, taking advertising and magazine photographs and working with the Australian Opera and the Australian Ballet. In 1970 he was invited to work in the consciously creative venue, the Yellow House in Potts Point, Sydney, photographing its artists, installations and activities. Over the next three decades he photographed artists and their works, assembling the collection published as Australian Artists: Portraits by Greg Weight in 2004.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
Accession number: 2004.98
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Patrick Corrigan AM (123 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
Portraits of philanthropists in the collection honour their contributions to Australia and acknowledge their support of the National Portrait Gallery.
Pat Corrigan's generous gift of 100 photographic portraits by Greg Weight.
Open Air is an exhibition of portraits of Australians in environments of particular significance to them.