Famed Australian artist Tracey Moffatt’s archive donated to Chau Chak Wing Museum

A major archive documenting four decades of Tracey Moffatt’s career has been donated to the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, providing unprecedented access to the work of one of Australia’s most internationally recognised contemporary artists.

The anonymous donation includes an edition of every photographic work, film and video Moffatt has produced since 1985. It is the first donation of its kind to an Australian museum.

The collection is being celebrated with Tracey Moffatt Sorted – a look at her Archive, an exhibition created in collaboration with Moffatt and featuring artworks, ephemera and previously unseen archival material.

Moffatt has given the museum complete access to an archive containing thousands of documents and objects, including idea sketches, personal photographs, film props, correspondence and photographic test prints.

Inspired by Andy Warhol, Moffatt describes these materials as “time capsules”, offering an insight into the ideas and experiments behind her finished works.

“These demonstrate ideas that didn’t work,” she said.

The exhibition includes major works such as Scarred for Life II (1999) and the film montage Other (2010).

Moffatt's career spans photography, film and video, with highlights including Nightcries – A Rural Tragedy (1989) and BeDevil (1993), both presented at Cannes.

She represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and became the first Australian artist to receive a film retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

The donated works and archive will be housed in a dedicated Tracey Moffatt Archive room, with philanthropic support funding a curatorial role.

Moffatt said she was “thrilled and honoured” to have the archive preserved at the museum.

“I just love that one can walk through the museum and see an ancient Egyptian mummy and then, around the corner, cool and often obscure international contemporary art from the 1960s,” she said.

Museum director Michael Dagostino said the institution was honoured to become custodian of the collection.

“No museum in Australia has been gifted an artistic archive of such depth and scale,” he said.

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