ISLAMIC ART
Now showing
Gallery 19
Free admission
This display in Australia’s only public gallery space permanently dedicated to Islamic art
explores the rich history of artistic exchange between Chinese ceramic artists and the Muslim
world. A major impetus for Chinese potters to develop blue-and-white porcelain was the demand for
the decorated wares among markets that stretched from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. As early
as eight hundred years ago, Muslim merchants exported cobalt oxide mineral from Iraq to China for
use in the manufacture of the blue-and-white porcelain still popular today but which was then
called ‘Mohammedan blue’.
Islamic Art features a range of ceramics including large shallow plates that were
specifically intended for the Muslim custom of sharing communal dishes at meals. The symmetrical
configurations of the geometrical and floral porcelain motifs are influenced by Islamic designs
popular in the Ottoman world. In Islam the subject of flowers symbolised the auspicious felicity of
Heaven’s paradise, a word whose linguistic origin is the Old Persian term for a ‘walled garden’.
Also included in the display are richly decorated Indonesian textiles featuring Arabic
calligraphy and floral patterns inspired by the royal pleasure gardens of Javanese sultans.
detail: India, Portrait of a holy man, late 18th - 19th century, possibly Lucknow, Uttar
Pradesh, paper, coloured pigments; Gift of Barrie and Judith Heaven
