Home Sweet Home

This exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection reveals the passions of a collector who, since the 1980s, has supported emerging artists from Australia and New Zealand and has watched their careers develop. It shows how the Peter Fay collection has broadened from paintings to include diverse media such as object-based works, as well as ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ art, illustrating the dialogues between the two.

To be part of this exhibition Home Sweet Home: works from the Peter Fay collection is to be part of an adventure. This exciting show of predominantly Australian and New Zealand contemporary art is about a collection that comes from a domestic context and examines the way the idea of ‘home’ — and by extension our hearts and minds — can be transformed by art. It is an eclectic, idiosyncratic, at times iconoclastic collection that reveals the passions of a collector who is himself an artist. It reveals a collector who has supported emerging and outsider artists as well as others who are well known. This exhibition challenges established conventions through bringing together art by both mainstream and marginalised artists to blur the boundaries between the two. Roger Cardinal’s comments in a recent catalogue, Marginalia: perspectives on outsider art, might equally relate to Peter Fay’s vision: ‘The art offers us the prospect of an alternative and potentially revolutionary way of seeing.’ It is work that ‘may provoke a steady rapturous ache in the beholder’.

A National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition