MELBOURNE.- Heide Museum of Modern Art reopened on Saturday 30 October with the first retrospective of Margel Hinder (1905–1995), one of Australia’s most important and dynamic, yet underrated, modernist sculptors. The exhibition Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion is being displayed in Heide’s main galleries from Saturday 30 October until 6 February 2022 and is a tribute to her great, and ever-expanding, creative vision.

Heide Artistic Director, Lesley Harding commented: “We are delighted to welcome the public back to Heide after more than two months of closure. While it has been a difficult eighteen months for our sector, we are reopening with confidence about the future and a very exciting program ahead including this stunning survey of the work of one of Australia’s most significant female artists.”

Developed in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the exhibition spans Margel Hinder’s five-decade career and showcases approximately 70 sculptures sourced from private and public collections across Australia, as well as the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s rich holdings of both her works and archive.

Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion aims to redress Hinder’s profile as one of the most underestimated Australian sculptors of the 20th century and uncovers the expansive nature of her creativity, and her skill in giving sculptural form to universal concepts like time and motion in materials expressive of the era. From her early carvings in wood and stone in the 1930s and 40s to the ‘space age’ kinetic and wire works of the 1950s and major public commissions in the 1960s, Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion traces the development of Hinder’s practice and her role in shaping modernist sculpture in Australia.

Lesley Harding said: “Apart from her inclusion in a few surveys of local modernism, Hinder’s vanguard practice and its legacy have largely been overlooked since the 1980s. This exhibition presents her innovative and visually arresting sculpture to new generations and the wide audience it deserves, highlighting her vital role in the making of Australian modernism and asserting the place of sculpture within it.”




Born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated in Buffalo and Boston, Hinder (nee Harris) migrated to Australia in 1934, following her marriage to Australian artist Frank Hinder, where her mature practice flourished.

“After arriving in Sydney Margel quickly found a compatible and supportive milieu among artists similarly educated overseas and brimming with ideas, theories and methods that set them apart from their locally trained contemporaries. Over the ensuing years, they made advancements in abstract art that paralleled those elsewhere in the world.” Added Harding who co-curated the exhibition with the Art Gallery of NSW Senior Curator of Australian art Denise Mimmocchi.

Exhibition highlights include Hinder’s commanding kinetic works, whose slow rotations encapsulate a sense of the world in perpetual motion, and an immersive installation based on two of Hinder’s major public sculptures.

Created by Dr. Andrew Yip, Lecturer in Art & Design at the University of New South Wales, the life-size digital reconstructions are of two of the most significant public sculptures of Hinder’s career: the Civic Park Fountain, Newcastle 1961–66 and the now decommissioned Northpoint Fountain 1975. This project allows for a presence of this important component of Hinder’s art within the context of her retrospective and demonstrates the sophistication of her ideas, with her inclusion of carefully choreographed moving water amid object formations.

Mimmocchi said the exhibition is an opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of Hinder’s oeuvre. “Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion brings together major sculptures from public and private collections, immersive representations of public sculptures, drawings, and archival photographs to present an insightful portrait of the pioneering sculptor’s life and work. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a substantial collection of more than 40 Hinder maquettes, recently restored for this exhibition, that reveal incredible details of her creative processes.”

The exhibition is accompanied by the richly illustrated publication Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion featuring essays by Denise Mimmocchi; Lesley Harding; object conservator Melanie Barrett; University of New South Wales Art & Design lecturer, Dr. Andrew Yip; and a foreword by the University of Oxford professor of the history of art Dr. Geoffrey Batchen.