The rabbit in art: ‘miffy & friends’
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To mark the end of a year marked by anxiety, introversion and isolation, the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum in Brisbane organised an uplifting, joyous and celebratory exhibition focused on the Dutch artist and author Dick Bruna’s widely influential creation Miffy. ‘miffy & friends’ (which continues at the south-east Melbourne gallery Bunjil Place until 13 June) is the first Australian exhibition of this internationally acclaimed illustrator (1927–2017), born Hendrik Magdalenus Bruna in Utrecht. His distinguished and varied practice is given local agency by the inclusion of a group of Australian artists whose practices engage with or were in some way shaped by Miffy, a small female rabbit invariably drawn by Bruna with a continuous, regularised dark line.
The characteristics of Bruna’s distinctive graphic language of economy and clarity were formulated in the mid-1950s in a synthesis of successive early twentieth-century European modernities: in particular, the refinement of Matisse and the economy of Léger, whose name in French revealingly translates into English as ‘lightweight’ – a pejorative term often and somewhat hypocritically applied to artists whose work, like Bruna’s, manages to be popular and accessible. Miffy’s interiority is, however, quite complicated in contrast to her ostensibly simple exterior. For more than 60 years, she has been open to multiple and increasingly complex interpretations, while more recently her transcultural agency has been cited as prescient.
This makes ‘miffy & friends’ consequent to exhibition-making in multicultural Australia, particularly for institutions seeking to reach out to non-traditional audiences and build a more diverse engagement with their programming. Miffy is also the greatest influence on the development of an artist similarly known only by a mononym (Nell, as noted in conversation with the exhibition’s curator Vanessa Van Ooyen in the catalogue). And it is the way in which this young rabbit has seemingly manifested herself in the works of Australian artists as different as Nell, Brian Robinson and Vipoo Srivilasa that makes ‘miffy & friends’ such a seductive project in art-historical terms. Additionally, works by Stephen Bird, Sadie Chandler, Nadia Hernández and Carla McRae are on display in an adjacent space. This ensemble of disparate local artists gives ‘miffy & friends’ a surprising but compelling relevance, evidencing an alternative creative lineage for a contemporary Australian art.
‘miffy & friends’ includes not only the finished artworks for more than six decades of Miffy, who first appeared in print in 1955, but, importantly, the larval stages of Bruna’s exacting, time-consuming process. These include numerous preparatory drawings on transparent paper, subsequently transferred to watercolour paper and the completed gouache or poster paintings.
Miffy’s abiding cuteness is part of Bruna’s continuing legacy in our region, attested to by her echo through the graphic language of kawaii, most notably in characters such as Hello Kitty. Indeed, it is rare to find exhibitions in which challenging, more culturally fluid frameworks such as this are elaborated for and around familiar Australian practices.
Gary Carsley, Brisbane
Curated by Vanessa Van Ooyen, ‘miffy & friends’ was exhibited at QUT Art Museum, Brisbane from 21 November 2020 until 14 March 2021; it is currently being shown at Bunjil Place, Melbourne, until 13 June 2021.
