Australian Art
Peter Powditch: Coast – A Retrospective
Friday, April 14th, 2017 Art Column, Australian Art,Pop to Popism, held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2014, was not a show that left glowing memories, but one work has remained lodged in my mind. Peter Powditch’s The Big Towel, which appeared in the Australian section of the exhibition, looked incredibly fresh for a painting made in 1969. Part of its […]
The National
Saturday, April 8th, 2017 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art,One wonders if The National: New Australian Art is intended as a subtle riposte to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Now of 2013-14. “No navel gazing here in Sydney – we’re bringing you art from all over the country.” The NGV’s bright idea may have been predicated on Melburnian self-esteem but final attendances topped […]
Australia at the Royal Academy
Saturday, September 28th, 2013 Art Column, Australian Art,Australia at the Royal Academy of Arts in London has echoes of Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster movie of 2010. Like that overblown, incoherent concoction, the one-word title of the RA show suggests this is all you will ever need to know about Australian art. It presents itself as a definitive statement. Kathleen Soriano, Director of Exhibitions […]
David Boyd
Saturday, September 8th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,If one had to nominate a director to make a movie about the Boyd family, it would be hard to go past Wes Anderson. After watching his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, I imagined what he might do with the eccentric childhood of David Boyd and his siblings at their Murrumbeena property, Open Country. One painting […]
Rollin Schlicht & Shaun Gladwell
Saturday, September 1st, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,Rollin Schlicht was a complex personality. Many people found him to be abrasive and self-centred, but he was also strikingly intelligent and could be charming if it suited him. Schlicht was born in 1936, and died of pancreatic cancer on 1 March, last year. He was by turns, both artist and architect. Torn between these […]
William Robinson, Aida Tomescu, Evelyn Kotai
Saturday, August 25th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,Fred Williams used to say that if you can’t paint a portrait then your art is in trouble. He would have been surprised to see so many portraits included in his recent retrospective, as they were only ever a diversion from his landscape paintings. For an artist there is always the danger that one day […]
Robert Hughes, 1938 – 2012
Sunday, August 19th, 2012 Australian Art, Blog, General Art Essays, International Art,When Robert Hughes died last week, I spent much of the day on the telephone. Inevitably, the passing of this great, controversial figure was a media event of the first order. Among the mass of small comments I had to produce, the Sydney Morning Herald asked for a quick 500 words. The following day the […]
Melbourne Art Fair 2012
Saturday, August 11th, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art,Another Melbourne Art Fair, another chance to take the unsteady pulse of the local art market. With no hard data about turnover, a hasty prognosis would suggest the sector is still feeling the pain, although smiling through tears. Every year the Fair commissions a major work that is subsequently gifted to a public gallery. This […]
Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial 2012
Saturday, August 4th, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,When Japan was devastated by the Tohoku earthquake on 11 March last year, one of the casualties was a century-old farm house in the tiny community of Urada, in the mountains near Tokamachi City. Less than two years previously this building had been designated ‘Australia House’ at the 2009 Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial (ETT), serving […]
18th Biennale of Sydney
Saturday, July 14th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,One of the most striking images in the 18th Biennale of Sydney is that of Japanese artist Sachiko Abe, dressed in bridal white, sitting in a small brick building in Cockatoo Island, cutting paper. Visitors are asked to remain silent, so the only sound is the noise made by Abe’s scissors as she trims sheets […]