BERLIN, GERMANY.- The Hamburger Bahnhof opened in 1996 and houses the National Gallery’s collection of contemporary art. It focuses on the second half of the 20th century and has an 8,000 square meter exhibition area.

The Hamburger Bahnhof is part of the Preußischer Kulturbesitz which includes some of Germany’s most important museums and galleries, including the New National Gallery, Museum for the Present, the Egyptian Museum, Museum of Ethnology, the Picture Gallery, Museum of Applied Arts.

Dr. Britta Schmitz joined the Preußischer Kulturbesitz as a curator in 1983. Dr Schmitz has been responsible for the National Gallery’s collection of post war art, as well as temporary exhibitions including: Gerhard Richter, Edgar Degas and 1945/85 Art in Germany and from 1985 to 1990, Dr Schmitz was the director of Dépendence of the National Gallery for Current Art (Art Forum in the Grundkredit Bank). Dr Schmitz developed, among other high profile shows, the Lucian Freud exhibition at the New National Gallery.

FACE UP - Contemporary Art from Australia seeks to present the concentrated and vital art scene of Australia by exhibiting fourteen different artistic positions. Bringing together different generations, the exhibition refrains from restricting the notion of "contemporary" to the youngest generation of practising artists, as is so often the case. The older, yet highly contemporary painting of Robert MacPherson will be positioned side by side with the artworks of a "middle" generation of Australian artists, represented by the large-format photography of Rosemary Laing, by the video projections of Susan Norrie, the vitrine sculptures of Fiona Hall and the in situ painting of Guan Wei, to mention but a few.

The most recent and innovative developments in the international art scene will be subject to new consideration with the works of artists such as Patricia Piccinini, David Rosetzky, Daniel von Sturmer and Simryn Gill, whose practice engages with and examines the possibilities of media technologies. The concept of sculpture will be questioned and teased in different ways by the works of Callum Morton and James Angus, who also belong to the younger generation. Mikala Dwyer will be sounding out the terrain between installation and painting. Ah Xian will be expressively referencing his own Chinese roots, linking in a manner most unique the western sculptural conception of the human figure with the Chinese porcelain tradition. With the work of Darren Siwes, an urban indigenous artist who takes public urban space in postcolonial Australia as his photographic subject, the spectrum of Australian art will be shown in its aesthetic and thematic diversity.

The selected artists stand out, on the one hand, for the speed with which their work has attracted international attention and, on the other hand, for the clear mark their practice has made within Australia. Indeed the exhibition is as much focused on the question of where Australian art has come from, as it is on the directions it is taking today, and on the place it already occupies within the international art context. The exhibition is not intended to constitute a "national" representation as such, since contemporary Australia is made up of a unique combination of rich traditions and extraordinarily dynamic cultures.

As one of the most culturally diverse nations in the world, the cultural scene in Australia has a significant and essential contribution to make to current debates surrounding the tension between periphery and centre in modern art. The history of art in the western world more or less has its roots in Europe, yet Australia is as about as geographically far away from Europe as possible. Asia and Japan are closer, and over the past twenty years, cultural influences from the entire Asia-Pacific region have increasingly manifested themselves in the country’s cultural landscape. The distance from these "centres" has always embodied a challenge for Australia; it has been and continues to be actively discussed. With the new technologies of communication and growing ease of international travel, however, a lively international exchange has ensued, with both these phenomena playing an important part in the more recent artistic positions.

Australian artists are flexible and operate within very different contexts, both in the production and in the reception of their works. In part, this can be interpreted as an expression of resistance towards attitudes presuming that artistic creation can somehow be regionally determined. For this reason, many artists have elected to withdraw from discussions of centre and periphery altogether. Indeed, as we will see, Australia already has a rich, well-established infrastructure for contemporary art and the majority of the artists who will be represented here in Berlin have been exhibiting on the international scene for years.