A special exhibition at Gosford Regional Gallery will be available for viewing until June 9.
A Glint of Koi features significant artworks from the gallery’s permanent collection.
Acquired through the Australian Cultural Gifts Program, donations, acquisitive prizes and bequests, the collection is designed to make a statement about the visual arts culture of the Central Coast and its place within a national cultural context.
The collection holds more than 700 works, a selection of which are displayed throughout Central Coast Council buildings and at the Gosford Hospital.
A Glint of Koi explores the artistic and cultural identity of the Central Coast and the intricacies of civic collections.
One of the featured artists is the late Judy Cassab, who started painting at the age of 12, while living in Vienna.
She later studied at the Academy of Art in Prague, leaving Austria during the occupation in 1939 and resuming her studies in Hungary.
In 1951, after losing most of her immediate family in Nazi concentration camps, she moved with her husband and two sons to Sydney, where she established a very successful career as a portrait and landscape painter, painting in the style of the European modernists.
Her work possesses a sense of her creative curiosity and intelligence.
Cassab won the Archibald prize twice, the Trustee Watercolour prize twice, and held more than 70 solo exhibitions.
Her work is held in important collections worldwide, including all Australian art galleries, the National Portrait Gallery, Australia, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Budapest.
She was awarded an order of Australia medal in 1988.
Her son John Steed gave a talk on her work at the gallery on May 24.
It included extracts from her diaries and videos of the artist painting Michael Kirby, Jack Thompson and other notable Australians.
Other artists whose work features in the exhibition include Elizabeth Cummings, Helen Geier, Elaine Haxton, Elwyn Lynn, Ursula Old, Ken Reinhard, David Rose, Shigeo Shiga, Imants Tillers and Gwyneth Tilley.