Our guest curator, Paul Zika, has brought his own challenging rigor to the exhibition. It grows out of a long-term research project documenting individual survey exhibitions of Australian artists after 1970. It is a project concerned with one of the fundamental paradoxes of recent Australian art; the relative invisibility of an artist’s oeuvre in an age in which the art market and information technology alike are booming. Zika and his research partners are redressing two blind spots in Australian art. First, many survey exhibitions have been staged but the record of them is patchy and difficult to access. Second, the parameters of the survey exhibition are rarely critically assessed. In this exhibition, Zika seeks to enhance the record of exhibition with a substantial catalogue and variety of distinctive interpretative essays. And, in presenting a thematic and highly reflective selection of works, he steps away from the usual foundations of biography and style.