Art Column
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro
Saturday, November 3rd, 2012 Art Column,Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro may be the first Australian artists to take full advantage of the new globalised art world. Over the past decade they have travelled incessantly, undertaken residencies in Europe and Asia, and exhibited their work in museums and private galleries from Kathmandu to Washington DC. The Museum of Contemporary Art has […]
Sculpture by the Sea 2012
Saturday, October 27th, 2012 Art Column,Sculpture by the Sea owes much of its appeal to its outdoor setting but the exposed location brings its own hazards. There have been years in which the narrow walking trail from Bondi to Tamarama was nothing but a procession of dueling umbrellas. This year the installation was impeded by strong winds that made it […]
Sydney Long
Saturday, October 20th, 2012 Art Column,It’s difficult to get too worked up about Sydney Long (1871-1955). He was, at best, an intriguing minor painter known for a few striking images. He was also a curious personality. Like Oscar Wilde, he was almost certainly gay, but married – a not uncommon combination in Sydney, even today. He could be charming or […]
Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture
Saturday, October 13th, 2012 Art Column,There is a simple explanation as to why Chinese contemporary art is so relentlessly satirical: 27 years of ideological rectitude, including that final decade of Mao-induced madness known as the Cultural Revolution. From the time the Communist Party took over in 1949 there was nothing much to laugh about. The workers paradise had been achieved, […]
Ken Whisson: As If
Saturday, October 6th, 2012 Art Column,Ken Whisson says he has always enjoyed being “outside of the awful mainstream”, but it may be that he is about to redefine what is mainstream and what is marginal. Ken Whisson: As If at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the most fascinating retrospective since the National Gallery of Australia’s George Lambert survey of […]
Picasso to Warhol
Saturday, September 29th, 2012 Art Column, Uncategorized,Australia’s economy may be one of the most robust in the world, but our art markets, and attendances at public galleries, lag far behind Europe and the United States. It is a cultural problem: a general feeling that visual art is not an essential part of life, merely a sideline or a luxury. This is […]
White Rabbit – Double Take
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 Art Column,Ever since Deng Xiaoping plunged China into the era of reforms in the late 1970s, with the legendary words: “To get rich is glorious”, the nation’s leaders have spent a great deal of time resolving – or ignoring – contradictions. Karl Marx himself would have had difficulty explaining the paradox of a communist country with […]
Bill Henson
Saturday, September 15th, 2012 Art Column,No living Australian artist has a higher international profile than Bill Henson, but the esteem in which he is held overseas has not been matched at home. For a large part of the population his name conjures up the darkest, most terrifying associations. Ever since the furore of 2008, when Henson was accused of child […]
Atget
Saturday, September 15th, 2012 Art Column,Eugène Atget (1857-1927) is often seen as a ‘primitive’ of the camera – photography’s equivalent to the Douanier Rousseau, but this is not a fair comparison. The Douanier was a simple soul, Atget was an equally lonely figure but also a sophisticated, skillful exponent of an art form still struggling for recognition. Although he never […]
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 […]