The National Gallery of Victoria's annual winter masterpieces series has been packed with some pretty massive names from the art world in recent years. The dual Terracotta Warriors and Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition has just wrapped up, following on from shows highlighting Van Gogh, Degas and Monet.
For 2020, the NGV is heading back to France with an exhibition highlighting the work of Pierre Bonnard, alongside an exhibition designed by Iranian-French architect and designer India Mahdavi.
Bonnard mightn't be quite as well known as some of the other artists who've featured in the series, but he had a prodigious output of bold and colourful paintings, building on the experimentation of the impressionists and capturing France at the beginning of the 20th century.
The exhibition has been developed in association with Paris's famed Musée d'Orsay, known for housing the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist (which is where Bonnard comes into the picture) paintings in the world. But the NGV will be showing 100 of his works, drawn from galleries including the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. There'll also be other works from the late 19th and early 20th century designed to show Paris at its most glamorous.
Mahdavi, who was named one of the world's 100 most influential designers by Architectural Digest, will be creating a whole new environment for the exhibition inspired by his use of vivid colour. And she could be the perfect designer for the task, given that she's known for designing the famous (and Instagram-famous) pink room at London's Sketch gallery.
The Pierre Bonnard exhibition will be at the NGV from June 5 to October 4, 2020.