Art Column
Olafur Eliasson
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 Art Column,When a show is called Take Your Time, and runs for four full months, there seems to be no great urgency in visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art. So little urgency that I’m always talking to people who missed an MCA exhibition because they thought they might go next week, or perhaps the week after, […]
Martin Sharp
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,There is a double edge to the exhibition title Martin Sharp: Sydney Artist, because Sharp is one of the very few Australian artists who enjoys a worldwide reputation. This is no mean feat for a man who says he has barely left his house for the past forty years. It remains a mystery whether he […]
Nicholas Harding Jeff Mincham
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 Art Column,Paintings may greet the viewer with grand attitudes or ugly looks, but most of them know their limitations. We find ourselves staring at an arrangement of colours and forms on a flat surface that provides an imaginary window onto the world – nature seen through a temperament, to use Zola’s formulation. Having become accustomed to […]
Lynette Wallworth & Circa 1979: Signal to Noise
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,This year’s Sydney Festival follows the familiar pattern of being chiefly concerned with theatre and music. This comes as no great surprise, but it is important that the visual arts events are not treated merely as an afterthought. Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art is the headline act, while the Campbelltown Arts Centre […]
Garden & Cosmos
Saturday, January 16th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,We know that something in our world has changed when India is issuing travel advisories to its citizens, warning that Melbourne is a dangerous place. The subcontinent, with its poverty; its heartless caste system; its heritage of religious strife, bloodshed and social unrest, has suddenly turned and pointed the finger at the barbarous practices of […]
Fiona Foley
Saturday, January 9th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,Fiona Foley is an artist who has benefited from being in the right place at the right time. Having begun exhibiting in the mid-1980s, she is young enough to have missed the great ideological battles that took place in the art of the sixties and seventies. She never had to worry about edges and picture […]
Masterpieces from Paris
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,Question time in Canberra: “Is Masterpieces from Paris the most important exhibition ever shown at the National Gallery of Australia, as NGA director, Ron Radford, has claimed?” Answer: No. This is a silly, opportunistic thing to say, as it is a show without an original thesis. Think back to the NGA’s Surrealism: Revolution by Night […]
Rupert Bunny
Saturday, December 19th, 2009 Art Column,Rupert Bunny’s mother gave him some sage advice at a young and impressionable age: that he must never be a bore. So well did he heed his mother’s words that one might forgive Bunny (1864-1947) almost anything. He was the most personable of artists – charming, well-read, a good conversationalist and a musician of exceptional […]
6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
Saturday, December 12th, 2009 Art Column, Uncategorized,Has it been fifteen years already? In its sixth installment the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery shows no signs of settling into a predictable pattern. On the contrary: the APT is the most dynamic contemporary art exhibition in Australia and quite possibly the world. It may not be the biggest of shows, […]
Rebecca Horn and Medicine & Art
Saturday, December 5th, 2009 Art Column,It’s appropriate that the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art is staging Japan’s first-ever Rebecca Horn retrospective at the same time the Mori Art Museum is hosting the show, Medicine and Art. Of all those who dwell in the upper echelons of international contemporary art, no-one has been more dedicated than Horn when it comes to […]