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Saturday, July 5th, 2014 Art Column,Taiwanese artist, Chien-Chi Chang, introduces his photo sequence, The Chain, with a quotation from Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer: “It is not by confining one’s neighbour that one is convinced of one’s own sanity.” He almost certainly found the line in the preface to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1964), where it is paired with […]
Arthur Boyd: An Active Witness
Saturday, June 28th, 2014 Art Column,Arthur Boyd (1920-99) was one of Australian art’s leading painters and one of its greatest mysteries. In the preface to her comprehensive biography, published in 2007, Darleen Bungey quotes Boyd’s youngest daughter, Polly, who calls her father “an enigma, probably one of the most secret people on earth.” This also acts as a disclaimer for […]
Italian Masterpieces
Saturday, June 21st, 2014 Art Column,Among the great art museums of the world, the Prado in Madrid may not have the biggest or most comprehensive collection, but it has an exceptional array of masterpieces. To view the greatest paintings by Velázquez, Goya and other Spanish old masters, a visit to the Prado is obligatory. It is also the place to […]
Encounters with Bali & Une Australienne: Hilda Rix Nicholas
Saturday, June 14th, 2014 Art Column,It would be fascinating to know how many art collections begin with an epiphany. The term, immortalised by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, refers to a sudden revelation, a moment of heightened consciousness. For Dr. John Yu that moment arrived one day in the late 1970s, when his […]
George Gittoes
Saturday, June 7th, 2014 Art Column,George Gittoes has given us the most horrible show in Sydney in 2014, or perhaps it’s the year’s greatest horror show. However one defines it, George Gittoes: I Witness at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery is a harrowing experience. Gittoes (b.1949) cut his teeth in the early 1970s with psychedelic paintings and puppet shows at Sydney’s […]
Head On, Michael Johnson & Eva Breuer
Saturday, May 31st, 2014 Art Column,Moshe Rosensveig is the Dr. Frankenstein of Australian photography – Head On, the photo festival he started five years ago, has become a certified monster. There are no fewer than 37 ‘featured’ exhibitions and almost 70 ‘associated’ exhibitions spread across the city, involving an estimated 900 artists. The program also boasts 150 events, including workshops, […]
Art Basel Hong Kong 2014
Saturday, May 24th, 2014 Art Column,Never has brand power been more in evidence at an art event than at Art Basel Hong Kong 2014. This was the seventh incarnation of this popular fair, but only the second under the ownership of the company responsible for the two biggest contemporary art fairs in the world – Art Basel and Art Basel […]
Sam Fullbrook
Saturday, May 17th, 2014 Art Column,When Matisse suggested that if you want to be an artist you must first cut out your tongue, he was acknowledging a fundamental truth: artists spout a lot of rubbish when they talk about their work. Rare indeed is the painter who can discuss his or her pictures in a calm, pragmatic manner, but Sam […]
Richard Mosse & William Kentridge
Saturday, May 10th, 2014 Art Column,Although the world is in colour, many photojournalists see it in black-and-white. When a photographer seeks to capture the brutality of a war or the pathos of its victims, colour is often seen as a distraction. The very absence of colour seems to symbolise the unbridgeable gulf between the world depicted in such images and […]
Bill Brown
Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 Art Column,Many years ago, when I was still a baby art critic, I remember Bill Brown at a party bawling drunkenly that he was the best painter in Australia. Having never seen his work I was in no position to argue. Shortly afterwards, Brown had a solo exhibition at the old Macquarie Galleries. If he was […]