Pinacotheca, Melbourne

Pinacotheca was a gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Established in 1967 by Bruce Pollard, it was ideologically committed to the avant-garde and represented a new generation of artists interested in post-object, conceptual and other non-traditional art forms.

Bruce Pollard opened the Pinacotheca gallery in May 1967, at 1 Fitzroy Street, a dark St Kilda bayside Edwardian mansion.

He relocated it to Bedggood's Shoe Factory, at 10 Waltham Place, Richmond, Melbourne in June 1970. An early owner of the building was notorious entrepreneur D. J. Henry 'Money' Miller.

The gallery closed in October 1999 and the business was de-registered in 2001, but re-opened in August 2002 for its very last exhibition, then closed permanently.

After the demise of John Reed's Museum of Modern Art Australia in 1966, Pinacotheca became the only gallery in Melbourne showing experimental work in the late 1960s and 1970s, exhibiting works by Art Language artists Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth and Mel Ramsden, and Dale Hickey's ironic 1969 work in which he commissioned a fencing contractor to install suburban-style fences of unpainted planks around the walls, of different heights tailored to the gallery's three separate rooms; the first only knee-high, the second intermediate and the third about chin level.

Pinacotheca's exhibitors were in the vanguard of Conceptualism; during The Field, the controversial show of Australian conceptual abstraction that opened the new premises of the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road, Pinacotheca, then in St Kilda, and concurrently with the NGV show, advertised 'for viewing' 15 of The Field artists in its stockroom alongside a solo by Rollin Schlicht; then in the next year, Joseph Kosuth coordinated the "exhibition" of part of his Second Investigation at several international galleries, each chosen as being adventurous venues showing conceptual art, that included the Pasadena Art Museum, Leo Castelli Gallery (New York), and Pinacotheca. The work was initiated by, and was executed in, Kosuth's request of the gallery directors to advertise his Second Investigation in newspapers, with any further action being left to them. Bruce Pollard placed Kosuth's statements as advertisements in national newspapers, including The Age, The Sun News-Pictorial and Newsday from his own funds.

Pinacotheca's avant-garde stance was paralleled only by Sydney's Inhibodress and Watters galleries, and indeed in 1977 a show Watters at Pinacotheca, during 4–28 May, showed Suzanna Archer, John Armstrong, George Barker, Jenny Barwell, Vivienne Binns, Hilary Burns, Tim Burns, James Clifford, Tony Coleing, Aleks Danko, John Delacour, Helen Eager, Jeanne Eager, Stephen Earle, Marr Grounds, Adrian Hall, Ian Howard, Noel Hutchison, Robert Jenyns, Ron Lambert, Richard Larter, Bruce Latimer, Frank Littler, Bridgid McLean, Marie McMahon, Patricia Moylan, Chris O'Doherty, Robert Parr, John Peart, Geoffrey Proud, David Rankin, Jon Rhodes, Ken Searle, Imants Tillers, Tony Tuckson, Vicki Varvaressos, Robin Wallace-Crabbe, and Max Watters. In 1984 David Thomas described the work exhibited at Pinacotheca, Watters and Inhibodress:

Already by 1970 Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne was a focus for reflective, quiet concern with everyday life, its processes and its visual banalities, as in the work of Robert Rooney and Dale Hickey. Watters Gallery in Sydney was a centre for the rougher, more casual, funky art of Mike Brown, Tony Coleing and John Armstrong. Inhibodress Sydney, 1970–72 was the place to see conceptual art, body art, performance and video by Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy.