‘Value Added’ explores how contemporary Australian artists have engaged with the legacy of the readymade. In these artworks, drawn from the Gallery’s Collection, artists have used and built on pre-existing objects, artworks and ideas, reinterpreting them from new perspectives. The display takes its title from conceptual artist Ian Burn’s ‘Value-added landscapes’ series – a phrase the artist took from an economic concept, which refers to the enhancement of a material’s monetary value through the manufacturing process.

The term ‘readymade’ was first used to describe French artist Marcel Duchamp’s use of everyday manufactured items in the 1910s. Like Duchamp, artists Ham Darroch and Stuart Ringholt adapt common household objects and strip them of their original functions in the process of turning them into art. Nola Campbell, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Jackie Kurltjunyintja Giles and Madonna Staunton also use found objects, but instead of upending their original functions, they transform discarded and scrap materials into artworks with both cultural and aesthetic significance. Similarly, Robert MacPherson and Lyndall Milani elevate everyday images into the domain of art.

Some artists bring outside materials into the art gallery, while others treat artworks as readymade objects and draw from art history itself. Gordon Bennett and Ian Burn incorporate examples from ‘high’ and ‘low’ or amateur painting traditions to uncover their indivisible links to ideology and politics. Art is also the subject of Peter Tyndall’s work, which deconstructs the process of viewing a painting in a gallery. In works by Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and Tim Woodward, pre-existing artworks and ideas are reframed to reveal how their meanings have evolved as a result of changes in visual presentation and social context.