GEORGE PLACE – DYNAMIC ART WALL 2022

Justin Miller Art in conjunction with Josef Lebovic Gallery are delighted to present The Great Australian Vintage Poster Show, the largest collection of original Australian advertising posters to be offered individually for sale in recent decades.

The exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the historical advertising of travel within Australia. These remarkable posters were designed at the time to provide glimpses of the vast Australian continent to both local and international audiences, decades before the advent of computers, emails, budget travel and Instagram influencers. Romantic visions of an arcadian, sun kissed and at times wild continent appealed to audiences from northern Europe as the nascent Australian tourism market began to develop. The leisure and pleasure of the beaches, the development of the continent’s main cities and the wonders of our outback are all celebrated in these gloriously designed and printed images, many created by the leading graphic artists of the day.

It is fascinating to observe a focus at the time on high speed leisure train travel to remote parts of Australia, a recent development celebrated in a number of these artworks. So too it is important to note that some of the images may in retrospect seem provocative to contemporary audiences, with their depictions of a country that has changed so rapidly both socially and in racial composition with the passing of the years. In this context several of the posters within the exhibition provide a fascinating insight into the way we perceived ourselves and were perceived by others in the first half of the 20th century.

Posters from this period, in such fine condition, are a great rarity and the artistic and technical skills of their creators a joy to behold. They provide a captivating, at times poignant and often sentimental glimpse into a visual culture that dominated Australia’s tourism advertising industry in the years gone by.