Julia deVille – Linden New Art, Melbourne
Saturday, September 15th, 2018 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Julia deVille Lives: Collingwood, Melbourne Age:36 Represented by:Sophie Gannon Gallery (No Sydney representation; Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane) Her thing.Multi-media installation with everything from jewellery to taxidermy, holograms and virtual reality. Our take.Julia deVille is represented by Sophie Gannon but for this exhibition she is undertaking her largest-ever installation under the auspices of Linden New […]
Sydney Contemporary 2018
Friday, September 14th, 2018 Art Column,This weekend is the high point of the year for the Sydney – and Australian – contemporary art scene. There may be some disagreement from folk in Melbourne, or from those who believe the Sydney Biennale remains the premier contemporary art event in this country. It’s clear though, the Sydney Contemporary art fair at Carriageworks […]
Lavazza Italian Film Festival 2018
Friday, September 14th, 2018 Film Reviews,In 2014 Paolo Sorrentino won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Great Beauty, a movie that updated Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the age of Silvio Berlusconi. The headliner at this year’s Lavazza Italian Film Festival is Sorrentino’s Loro, a bio pic of the former Italian Prime Minister, that paints a […]
Sun Xun
Friday, September 7th, 2018 Art Column,It may be a legacy of those heroic efforts Chairman Mao demanded at the time of the Great Leap Forward, or perhaps it’s mainly down to pressure of competition, but the Chinese art scene has the most stupendous work ethic. Go to any exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery and there will always be one […]
You Were Never Really Here
Friday, September 7th, 2018 Film Reviews,Last time we saw Joaquin Phoenix he was playing Jesus Christ in Garth Davis’s lacklustre Mary Magdalene. In Woody Allen’s Irrational Man of 2015, he was a verbose professor of philosophy that Emma Stone found unaccountably attractive. Finally, Phoenix has been given his ideal role – as Joe, a hired killer, in Lynne Ramsay’s You […]
The Insult
Friday, August 31st, 2018 Film Reviews,Mention the Middle East and most people think of the intractable conflict between the Israelis and their Arab neighbours, but the region is riddled with lingering enmities that never make international headlines. Beirut, once the most glamorous and cosmopolitan of cities, was the epicentre of a brutal civil war from 1975-1990 which began with battles […]
William Robinson: Genesis
Friday, August 31st, 2018 Art Column,And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Perhaps the strangest part in these famous words from the Book of Genesis is the emphasis on the word “was”. It makes God sounds like an audio […]
Charles Blackman 1928-2018
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 Blog,It’s a cliché when the death of an artist also represents ‘the end of an era’, but the death of Charles Blackman draws a line under a heroic generation of Australian figurative painters. Although it represents only a small episode in a long career, Blackman was the last of The Antipodeans – a group brought […]
Crazy Rich Asians
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 Film Reviews,Crazy Rich Asians arrives on a wave of hype that would put Hokusai to shame. We are told with great fanfare that it’s the first Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian cast since Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993). It’s seen more broadly as an antidote to Hollywood’s phobia about using Asian actors, which […]
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards 2018
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018 Art Column,A remarkable thing happened at this year’s 35th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT): the stand-out work actually won the major prize. The annual circus of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman may have given me a jaundiced view of art prizes, […]
