Artistic Directors, Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster

Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster are the Artistic Directors of the 18th Biennale of Sydney. They have recently collaborated at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where they participated in the re-installation of the Gallery’s collection in the renovated museum building by Frank Gehry. De Zegher and McMaster led the reinstallation of the European and Canadian galleries respectively. They have also worked together on the exhibition Draw & Tell: Lines of Transformation by Norval Morrisseau/Copper Thunderbird (2001) at The Drawing Center in New York.

About Catherine de Zegher

Catherine de Zegher is a curator, editor and writer. She is Visiting Curator at the Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona and until recently, Guest Curator at the Department of Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organised award-winning exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. De Zegher was Director of Exhibitions and Publications, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and, for many years, was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Drawing Center, New York. Before working in North America, she was co-founder and Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium.

Her exhibitions and books have received international acclaim, such as America: Bride of the Sun. 500 Years of Latin America and the Low Countries (1992) at the Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp; and Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (1994–96) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. De Zegher has curated several award-winning exhibitions including Eva Hesse Drawing (2006), which received the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Award for excellence; 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin (2005), which received the Best Show AICA (International Association of Art Critics) Award 2005; and On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at MoMa, which received the US Art Critics Association (AICA-USA) award in 2012 for Best Thematic Museum Show in New York. In 1997, de Zegher was the Belgian Commissioner to the XLVII Venice Biennale and in 2013 she will be the Curator of the Australian Pavilion with Simryn Gill.

Recently, de Zegher has been appointed as the next Artistic Director of the 5th Moscow Biennale.

About Gerald McMaster

Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist and writer, and since 2005 has been the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where he recently curated Inuit Modern: The Esther and Samuel Sarick Collection. He was also a member of the curatorial team for the 2010 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, McMaster was the Director’s Special Assistant for Mall Exhibitions and Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources. McMaster was also Curator, Canadian Museum of Civilization.

McMaster is the editor of a number of books, and in 1995 was the Canadian Commissioner to the XLVI Venice Biennale. He has curated many renowned exhibitions, including In the Shadow of the Sun (1988), Indigena (1992), Edward Poitras (1995) and Reservation X (1998). While at the Smithsonian he co-edited and co-curated First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art (2004), edited and curated New Tribe: New York (2005–06) and co-curated Remix: Multiple Modernities in a Post-Indian World (2007).