This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 35.3016° S, 149.1366° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Seven steel pears gathered on a lawn at the National Gallery, and they are one of the most recognisable pieces of Australian sculpture.
George Baldessin's Pear – version number 2 stands in the Australian Gardens of the National Gallery of Australia sculpture garden, beside James Turrell's Within without. The gallery describes seven shiny steel pears gathered together – and the plural is the work. A single monumental pear would be an object; seven of them at slightly different scales, clustered, become a group with an implied relationship.
Baldessin was among Australia's most significant printmakers and sculptors, and the pear was his recurring form – worked and reworked across his career until it became a signature. He died in 1978 at forty-nine, in a car accident, which cut off a body of work that was still developing.
The pears have since become shorthand for the gallery itself. They sit outdoors, free to visit, in the sculpture garden that runs down toward the lake, and they are photographed by essentially everyone who walks through.
Canberra's oversized objects tend to divide sharply between the civic-cheerful and the seriously artistic – Big Swoop and the kissing galahs on one side, Alex Seton's marble parcel and these on the other. The pears belong to the second group and are the best known of them.
No answer exists for the year and its proportions.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The National Gallery currently describes seven shiny steel pears gathered in the Australian Gardens beside James Turrell’s Within without.
ACCESS
The seven steel pears are in the National Gallery of Australia’s Australian Garden on the south side of the Gallery, next to James Turrell’s Within without. The stored point is a map-checked Australian Garden site reference rather than a claimed pear-centroid coordinate. Use normal Gallery visitor access and continue on foot.
