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Arthur Boyd Tapestries Shown Together for First Time in 50 Years

The National Gallery of Australia is mounting the full 20-work Life of St Francis series to foreground the tapestries’ scale, hand craft and weaving history.

Australian artist Arthur Boyd's tapestries feature scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi. (Lukas Coch/AAP PHOTOS)
Vera Fino, director of the Manufactura de Tapearias de Portalegra, with senior curator Elspeth Pitt, in the new exhibition of Arthur Boyd's tapestries. Picture National Gallery of Australia

Overview

  • The National Gallery will open the complete Arthur Boyd: Tapestries exhibition on Saturday, June 20, displaying all 20 St Francis works together for the first time since they were made in the mid-1970s.
  • Boyd commissioned the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre in 1970 to translate his pastels into monumental weavings that were completed around 1974 and acquired by the gallery in 1975.
  • Each tapestry measures up to about 3.4 metres across and contains an estimated four million to 8.5 million individual stitches produced by teams of women weavers using traditional hand techniques.
  • The gallery’s installation uses floating mounts and a central work shown from the verso so visitors can study the knots and structure, and the program includes public events with the Australian Tapestry Workshop.
  • The show restores a long-hidden chapter of Boyd’s practice and the Manufactura’s labour, and it reunites the tapestries with material from Boyd’s 1975 gift of roughly 4,000 works that helped build the national collection.