Art Column
Tree of Life
Tuesday, May 11th, 2021 Art Column,One could hardly imagine a more universal subject than the tree. It’s one of the first things children draw, as a familiar lollipop shape. It lies at the centre of almost every major cosmology, from Adam and Eve’s misadventures in the Garden of Eden to Yggdrasil, the tree at the centre of the old Norse […]
She-Oak and Sunlight
Tuesday, May 4th, 2021 Art Column,Do we really need another survey of Australian Impressionism? It’s been 14 years since the National Gallery of Victoria’s previous overview of the field and one wonders what new breakthroughs have occurred since then. In 2007 it still seemed a novel idea that we might call this group of artists “Impressionists” in place of more […]
The National 2021
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 Art Column,Conceived as “a celebration of contemporary Australian art”, The National has been a strange beast ever since its inception in 2017. One of the problems of this event – a biennial collaboration between the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks – is that it has occasionally seemed to be a […]
Dobell Drawing Prize 2021
Monday, April 19th, 2021 Art Column,If anyone should know about drawing it’s Guy Warren – he’s been doing it for about 90 years, although he only began taking lessons in his teens. When I spoke with Warren last week, as he was closing in on his century, he related drawing, and art in general, back to prehistoric times. “Making a […]
William Yang: Seeing & Being Seen
Monday, April 5th, 2021 Art Column,William Yang is a Sydney institution but a Queenslander born and bred. Last week he was reclaimed by his state of origin for a retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery that allows us to read one artist’s career as a tale of social evolution. Even allowing for the wrong turnings of the present day, over […]
Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment
Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 Art Column,On a rainy day in Sydney it feels completely appropriate to be writing about Clarice Beckett. She was an artist for whom the ideal atmospheric conditions were overcast, a bit misty. Her work is all about the weather. As a subject it couldn’t be more commonplace but it transports us into a realm of indistinct […]
Papunya Tula: 50 Years 1971-2021
Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 Art Column,After 50 years the Papunya Tula Art Movement has carved out a deep niche in Australian art history, but the settlement itself was a desolate place born from a long history of misunderstandings and misguided policies. The one and only time I visited Papunya, roughly 240 kms north-west of Alice Springs, it was almost deserted. […]
Margel Hinder
Tuesday, March 16th, 2021 Art Column,When Margel Hinder told an interviewer in 1972 that she was “terribly thrilled by all the television towers” it may have sounded like a joke about Sydney’s suburban sprawl, but she was probably quite sincere. Hinder drew inspiration from both natural and mechanical forms, being as fascinated by a spider web as by a metal […]
Bill Henson
Saturday, March 13th, 2021 Art Column,A new exhibition by Bill Henson is always an event – an eruption of the extraordinary into the fabric of everyday life. That hyper-productive philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, suggests that for most people the fundamental earth-shattering event is falling in love. Why would we describe this process as a “fall” if it wasn’t in some way […]
Edwin Wilson
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 Art Column,If you’ve spied a For Sale sign outside of 479 Old Pacific Highway, Artarmon recently, you’ve not only seen a real estate opportunity but a piece of Australian art history. For 65 years Artarmon Galleries has showed the work of leading Australian artists such as George Lambert, Norman Lindsay, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Lloyd Rees, […]