Our conservators care for the artworks in the Gallery's Collection, and include specialists in the conservation of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, time-based art, textiles and frames.
The Centre for Contemporary Art Conservation (CCAC) is QAGOMA’s conservation research facility, equipped with investigative and analytical tools including microscopes, spectroscopy, infra red imaging and X-ray facilities that allow us to examine artworks in extraordinary detail. Learning opportunities available through the CCAC include internships and work placements for tertiary students enrolled in conservation programs.
QAGOMA has embarked on a world-leading conservation and research exchange with colleagues in India to document and conserve a collection of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) embellished oleographs.
Ravi Varma was a renowned Indian artist whose work gave vivid form to Hindu gods and goddesses, aristocrats and maharajahs, as well as scenes from everyday life. His works opened access to images of the deities at a time when temples were reserved for the elite.
Originally a painter popular with the royal courts, Ravi Varmi established a printing press in Mumbai in 1894 with imported German machines and techniques, enabling him to develop high-quality prints based on his paintings.
By the early 1900s, images of the oleographs produced by the Raja Ravi Varma Press permeated Indian popular culture and the lives of everyday people, appearing on calendars, match-box labels, posters, postcards and advertisements, and influencing the development of Indian cinema and contemporary art.
Before conservation treatment
The collection of 48 uniquely embroidered Raja Ravi Varma oleographs — prints designed to resemble oil paintings — include some of the artist’s most iconic images, printed by the Press from the late 1800s and continuing after his death. They feature Hindu gods and goddesses in scenes adapted from mythological stories and epic poems such as the Mahābhārata, the Ramayana and the Puranas. The works depict deities such as Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Krishna and Ram and reflect a fusion of Ravi Varma’s European art training with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography.
Many of these works were originally displayed in private domestic settings, in devotional puja rooms and spaces for worship. Some have been lovingly hand-embellished with brightly coloured cloth, beads and zardozi embroidery. Printed and subsequently embellished a century or more ago, these works require significant and complex conservation treatment to stabilise their condition.
Once conserved through this ground-breaking conservation exchange, a selection of Ravi Varma’s Press oleographs will be shown in the exhibition ‘The God of Small Things: Faith and Popular Culture’.
‘The God of Small Things: Faith and Popular Culture’ explores the omnipresence of faith in the mundane and extraordinary alike. Drawing its title from Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize–winning novel, the exhibition delves into the intersection between devotional imagery and popular culture, capturing the different conceptions and expressions of the divine as a living part of everyday life.
Alongside Ravi Varma’s twentieth-century oleographs are works from India and across Asia that represent varied expressions of religious iconography, shrines and spaces of worship. The artworks also reflect – across a range of geographic and religious contexts – the presence of faith in everyday objects and its enduring influence on so many forms of creative expression.
The God of Small Things: Faith and Popular Culture
20 September 2025 – 5 October 2026
Queensland Art Gallery
Gallery 5 & 6 (Henry and Amanda Bartlett Galleries)
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry
The singular collection has been acquired by the Gallery through the Henry and Amanda Bartlett Trust in 2024.
QAGOMA is grateful to have secured a significant Maitri grant through the Australian Government and administered by the Centre for Australia-India Relations to support this world leading research and conservation project, which will include digital storytelling.
Staff travel to India will enable the exchange of specialist knowledge and research and conservation techniques with colleagues at the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru, and the study of works by Raja Ravi Varma across India.
This cultural exchange will be an opportunity to connect with global and diaspora audiences and be instrumental in conserving these beautiful works for future generations.
QAGOMA’s conservation and research exchange is supported by the Centre for Australia-India Relations. QAGOMA is proud to be a recipient of a Centre for Australia-India Relations Maitri grant.
Once a prominent colonial Queensland artist, Anthony Alder (27 December 1838–1915) and his works had all but vanished from public memory until, in 2011, his descendants’ estate was offered to the State Library of Queensland. Here, we reintroduce you to one of his works Heron’s home 1895 (illustrated).
Heron’s home | Before Conservation
Art history is a process of continually rediscovering the past and reinterpreting it for contemporary audiences. Alder is a significant Queensland colonial artist, apart from being the most prominent taxidermist in colonial Queensland, and widely admired for his dioramas when he entered employment with the Queensland Museum, he was also a painter of substance. Unfortunately, over the years, the appeal of his dioramas was forgotten and, apart from a major painting, Eagle and Fox (Not Game) 1895 (illustrated), which was occasionally on view at the Museum, knowledge of his work also slipped into oblivion.
Anthony Alder Eagle and Fox (Not Game) 1895
Staff of the Queensland Museum, 1912
Alder was born at Stroud, Gloucestershire and trained in the family’s taxidermy and casting business, Alder and Company, in Islington, London. He spent time working in Queensland from 1862 but returned to England on the death of his father in 1864, after the death of his mother in 1874, he returned and settled permanently in Queensland. Although he did not exhibit with the Queensland Art Society (est. 1887), Alder established a significant exhibition profile, he produced grisaille watercolour sketches that were published from 1894 in the Queenslander, the state’s most important weekly newspaper (illustrated).
He sought to emulate the work of ornithologist Silvester Diggles (1817–80) (Leadbeater’s cockatoo (Cacatua leadbeateri) c.1875 illustrated) who was Queensland’s most famous bird painter, and published Ornithology of Australia and Synopsis of the Birds of Australia. Diggles and his family arrived in Brisbane in 1854 and he soon became a key figure in the early cultural life of the city. He taught art and music, became our first photographer, helped found musical societies and the Queensland Philosophical Society (which subsequently developed into the Queensland Museum). Beginning in October 1863, Diggles single-handedly drew, coloured and described over 600 birds in eight years. He eventually published prints of 225 birds with descriptions of their habitat and life cycle in 21 sections from 1865 to 1870. When bound together, these became his major publication Ornithology of Australia.
Silvester Diggles Leadbeater’s cockatoo c.1875
Painted for the Queenslander by Anthony Alder
Alder also produced oil paintings and submitted several of these in what were essentially the first of the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association (QNA) annual exhibitions. He received an award for Eagle and Fox (Not Game) in the QNA of 1895, from where it was purchased by the state government for the Queensland Art Gallery but is now in the Queensland Museum’s Collection, and was also awarded the prize at the same exhibition for Lincoln sheep, homeward Laddie (illustrated), also 1895, which depicts the renowned stud flock at ‘Glengallan’, just outside Warwick.
Anthony Alder Lincoln sheep, Homeward Laddie 1895
A reassessment of Alder’s work was inspired when the work Lincoln sheep, homeward Laddie emerged from the collection of Alder’s descendants and was offered to the State Library of Queensland in 2011. The State Library has a special interest in ‘Glengallan’, as it holds the archive of the property which was donated by the widow of William Ball Slade’s eldest son, Oswald, in 1958.
At Slade’s time, the property was one of the showplaces of the Darling Downs; the homestead itself, a sandstone mansion built in 1867, was rescued from dereliction and restored as the Glengallan Homestead and Heritage Centre.
Slade called on Alder’s skills as a taxidermist, and this may have been the occasion for Alder to produce the work which, in a sense, is a record of the passing of the colonial squattocracy, as the property began to be broken up in 1895. Large-scale landscapes such as this are extremely rare in colonial Queensland.
Glengallan homestead
In mid 2011, the State Library’s Curator of Heritage Collections, advised the Gallery that Heron’s home was also available to a public collection. It was one of the two works Alder included in the 1897 Queensland International Exhibition (cat.95), and shared the exhibition with Josephine Muntz-Adam’s Care c.1893 (illustrated), the first Australian work purchased by the Queensland National Art Gallery.
Josephine Müntz-Adams Care 1893
Now restored, Heron’s home provides a marked counterpoint in detail and decorative appeal, and represents his skills in depicting natural history subjects — the area in which Alder forged his reputation.
The subject of this important painting is a pair of Nankeen night herons (Nycticorax caledonicus), which are named after the buff-coloured Nankeen cloth formerly produced in the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking). These herons are native to large parts of Australia and frequent well-vegetated wetlands, river margins and mangroves around Brisbane. Here, they are depicted in a beautifully rendered naturalistic riverine setting within a larger Queensland landscape.
Heron’s home | After conservation
Delve deeper into the Collection
Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA
