Geoffrey Hassall for many years has been the director of a family business, Loris H Hassall Pty Ltd, suppliers and processors of animal skins – kangaroo, goat, sheepskins as well as Wetblue cattle hides. He has been collecting Australian art for almost half a century and Australian Indigenous art since 1996.

Geoffrey and Virginia Hassall have amassed an extensive collection, selections from which have been shown in numerous galleries, particularly throughout regional Australia. Terence Maloon and Tony Oates, as curators of this exhibition, made a selection of pieces from the collection and have given this exhibition the somewhat clunky "masterpiece" title. As has become the fashionable norm in exhibitions of Australian art, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art have been juxtaposed in what can be described as an ongoing dialectic.

The selection has been almost exclusively of big names in Australian art - Ian Fairweather, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Robert Klippel, Ralph Balson, Ken Whisson, Janangoo Butcher, Tony Tuckson, Jon Molvig and Timothy Cook, among others - but the surprise lies in the quality of some of the individual pieces.

Fairweather is one of the great figures in 20th century Australian art and the three paintings included in the show - Painting XI (1960), Standing figures II (1967) and Summer shadows (1956) - are beauties. His Painting XI is about as non-figurative as he got - as he once famously declared, "My paintings are not abstract. I was trained as a traditionalist and thence proceeded under my own steam towards the abstract; but never completely. Abstraction does not suit me and I will always put into my painting some presentation. It is hard to live in two worlds. In any case I loathe labels."

Fairweather developed a dry, modulated and almost monochromatic technique of painting, possibly building on his training under Tonks at the Slade in London, but also embracing Chinese art and Aboriginal art. He denounced the colourful palette - "To me there’s something vulgar about coloured things" - and with calligraphic grace could create something like Standing figures II. The more you dissolve into the work the more magical it appears with the strange synthesis of flowing line, emblematic stillness and a glow that comes from within. No matter how enthusiastic one wants to be, Tuckson's work, in this exhibition, looks very tame compared to the Fairweathers.

Although Molvig is represented by two famous pieces, Lovers (1955) and The Bridesmaids (1956), they have not aged well. They may have been exceptional works in the 1950s but, from the perspective of today, they look a little predictable with their range of expressionist devices and the visceral anchoring of the figures within their surroundings.

The big Wakartu Cory Surprise, BimarralJila (2009) is brilliant and through scale and vibrancy holds its own on the wall and the viewer's attention. This veteran Fitzroy Crossing-based artist paints the waterholes, hills and sand dunes of Parrjalpartu, her mother and father's country. Like the large Emily, Wild Yam V (1995), they are clever works optically and have a complete confidence of touch. While Fairweather was known to spend years working on a painting, Emily and Wakartu Cory Surprise seem to know exactly what they will do the moment the brush touches the canvas.

Whisson’s Circus III (c1983), Balson’s Untitled (1960) and Timothy Cook’s Kulama No. 40-14 (2014) are some of the other paintings that remain in your mind as you leave the exhibition.

As a private art collection, at least based on this selection, there is a refined sensibility that runs throughout the show, where not only the big names in Australian art are present, but also work of high quality. Some of the small meditative pieces, including Nyapanyapan Yunupingu's Fallen leaves No. 2 (2009) and Klippel's untitled collages, are also some of the more successful exhibits.

The Hassall collection demonstrates that in Australia, given a generous budget, patience and a bit of training, one can assemble a collection of art of a very high calibre.