Pinacotheca was a gallery in Melbourne , Australia. Established in by Bruce Pollard, it was ideologically committed to the avant-garde and represented a new generation of artists interested in post-object, conceptual [ 1 ] and other non-traditional art forms. An early owner of the building was notorious entrepreneur D. Henry 'Money' Miller. The gallery closed in October and the business was de-registered in , [ 9 ] but re-opened in August for its very last exhibition, then closed permanently.
After the demise of John Reed's Museum of Modern Art Australia in , Pinacotheca became the only gallery in Melbourne showing experimental work in the late s and s, [ 13 ] exhibiting works by Art Language artists Ian Burn , Roger Cutforth and Mel Ramsden , and Dale Hickey 's ironic work in which he commissioned a fencing contractor to install suburban-style fences of unpainted planks around the walls, of different heights tailored to the gallery's three separate rooms; the first only knee-high, the second intermediate and the third about chin level.
Pinacotheca's exhibitors were in the vanguard of Conceptualism ; during The Field , the controversial show of Australian conceptual abstraction that opened the new premises of the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road , Pinacotheca, then in St Kilda, and concurrently with the NGV show, advertised 'for viewing' 15 of The Field artists in its stockroom alongside a solo by Rollin Schlicht; [ 15 ] then in the next year, Joseph Kosuth coordinated the "exhibition" of part of his Second Investigation at several international galleries, each chosen as being adventurous venues showing conceptual art, that included the Pasadena Art Museum , Leo Castelli Gallery New York , and Pinacotheca.
The work was initiated by, and was executed in, Kosuth's request of the gallery directors to advertise his Second Investigation in newspapers, with any further action being left to them. Already by Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne was a focus for reflective, quiet concern with everyday life, its processes and its visual banalities, as in the work of Robert Rooney and Dale Hickey. Inhibodress Sydney, β72 was the place to see conceptual art, body art, performance and video by Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy.
Its spacious accommodation in Richmond was in impression not unlike a New York SoHo loft, [ 19 ] and supported a similar sensibility; [ 20 ]. It was austerity and doggedness in timber, bricks and mortar, the aesthetic was primitive and cool, the art work was stripped of anything reassuring, and if the lights were off the visitor was expected to turn them on Clive Murray White described the aesthetic of the gallery as having the "air of New York: if you took a photograph of your work, it would look like a major international avant-garde show.
