The National Gallery of Victoria, in partnership with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, will present MoMA at NGV as the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition in 2018. MoMA at NGV will provide a unique survey of the Museum’s iconic collection. Consisting of approximately 200 key works, arranged chronologically into eight thematic sections, the exhibition will trace the development of art and design from late-nineteenth-century urban and industrial transformation, through to the digital and global present.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a renowned institution dedicated to championing innovative modern and contemporary art. The Museum opened in Manhattan in 1929, with the vision to become ‘the greatest modern art museum in the world’. This is reflected in its interdisciplinary collection of almost 200,000 works by over 10,000 artists, shared between six curatorial departments: Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Film, Media and Performance Art, Painting and Sculpture, and Photography.

The emergence of a ‘new art’ at the turn of the nineteenth-century will be represented by some of MoMA’s earliest acquisitions, including masterworks by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. Works by pioneering cubist and futurist artists, including Pablo Picasso and Umberto Boccioni, will appear alongside the radically abstracted forms present in works by such artists as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, the surreal visual language of paintings by artists like Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo, and the spontaneity and tactility advanced in works by Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock, and other prominent Abstract Expressionist artists.

Developments in art from the 1960s, from Minimalism through Post Modernism, will be explored with the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Keith Haring, among others. Significant works of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century art, including major pieces by Kara Walker, Rineke Dijkstra, Andreas Gursky, Olafur Eliasson, Huang Yong Ping, Mona Hatoum, El Anatsui and Camille Henrot, will foreground ideas that inform much contemporary art, such as those around cultural and national identity, and mobility in a globalised world.

These works of visual art will be displayed alongside objects from MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection, many of which draw out concerns common to architects, designers and artists — creating a new visual language for the modern era. These include: an architectural model by Le Corbusier that featured in MoMA’s first architecture exhibition in 1932; graphic designs, furniture and textiles by artists involved in the influential workshops of the Bauhaus; Tomohiro Nishikado’s pioneering computer game Space Invaders (1978); and the original set of 176 emoji developed by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 – characters which have since multiplied and become the visual language of the digital age.

Internationally exclusive to Melbourne, MoMA at NGV has been in development for more than two years and is curated by Samantha Friedman (Associate Curator, Drawings and Prints, MoMA), Juliet Kinchin (Curator of Modern Design, MoMA), Christian Rattemeyer (The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA) and Miranda Wallace (Senior Curator, International Exhibition Projects, NGV).