Dr Jenny Spinks – University of Melbourne, curator and project lead.

Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance – an exhibition of rare works sourced from the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria collections – is on display at Arts West Gallery, University of Melbourne, 22 July to 29 November 2024.

The exhibition has been curated by Hansen Associate Professor Jenny Spinks, Dr Matthew Champion, Dr Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow, and Professor Charles Zika, as well as Curatorial Assistant Jenny Smith. Its research has been supported by the Australian Research Council grant DP210101623

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) shaped the German Renaissance with his unforgettable images. He travelled widely, but belonged to a vibrant network of artists and craftspeople in Nuremberg, a key trading city in the Holy Roman Empire and a centre for religious and intellectual life. Book and print production developed there from the late fifteenth century alongside constant innovation in the city’s craft and manufacturing trades. Dürer first trained as a goldsmith. When he turned to making visual art, his metalworking skills helped him to push printmaking techniques – for engravings, etchings and woodcuts – to new levels of detail and inventiveness, dazzling his contemporaries.

Dürer’s interest in the natural world has long been acknowledged, but his fascination with manufactured and designed objects forms a vibrant and newer area of research. Depictions of contemporary cloth and clothing, featherwork, armour, precious metal vessels, measuring instruments, liturgical objects, hourglasses, and books – all objects made in Nuremberg – form part of the ‘material Renaissance’ that is a hallmark of his work and a feature of early print culture.

The exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material Renaissance recently opened at the Arts West Gallery at the University of Melbourne. It invites you to peer into Dürer and his contemporaries’ prints and books – objects in their own right – to explore how and why materiality mattered in early modern Europe. With over ninety items from the University’s Special Collections and the State Library Victoria, exhibits include Dürer’s Melencolia I engraving, a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible, and some of the most important books and prints of this period, including the famous 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle and Dürer’s own Treatise on Measurement. It has been co-curated by Jenny Spinks, Matthew Champion, Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow, and Charles Zika, working with curatorial assistant Jenny Smith. The opening event included a performance of music connected to Dürer’s Nuremberg by the renowned lutentist Rosemary Hodgson. The first month of the exhibition also saw a major workshop at the University of Melbourne, which brought experts from across the globe to talk about emotions and materiality in Dürer’s Nuremberg.

The exhibition forms an integral part of the larger research project “Albrecht Dürer’s Material World – in Melbourne, Manchester and Nuremberg” which brings together researchers from the universities of Melbourne, Manchester and Heidelberg: Jenny Spinks, Matthew Champion, Charles Zika, Sasha Handley, Stefan Hanß, Ed Wouk, and Dagmar Eichberger. The Melbourne exhibition was developed in dialogue with the exhibition Albrecht Dürer’s Material World at the Whitworth, University of Manchester (July 2023 – March 2024), curated by the Manchester team. The exhibitions, collectively, have aimed to refocus attention on the material world of Renaissance Nuremberg, and Dürer’s place within a network of other makers. The process of doing this has been highly collaborative, forged multiple connections with collections and curators, and opened up this material to new audiences.

Images: https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/about/arts-west-gallery/albrecht-durers-material-renaissance

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