Blog
Bob Edwards: A Eulogy
Friday, June 16th, 2023 Blog,Bob Edwards once asked me if I’d like to be director of a wellknown art institution. I said “No”, and have no regrets, but if I had wanted the job, I know he would have worked behind the scenes to make it a reality. He did this – discreetly – for others whom he had […]
Julia Gutman is the Winner
Friday, May 5th, 2023 Blog,This year’s Archibald Prize is a victory for youth. A 29-year-old artist has painted – or rather stitched – a portrait of a 27-year-old pop star. It’s not the worst work in the show, but I wouldn’t have called it as the best. My first impression of this year’s selection was that it was exceptionally […]
I by Day and You by Night
Saturday, April 29th, 2023 Blog,When we think of the Weimar Republic we inevitably think of crazy, decadent cabarets and social chaos, inflation so rampant that workers would carry their wages home in a wheelbarrow and rush to spend them before they lost more value. It sounds ridiculous, unbelievable, but at its worst – in November 1923 – one US […]
John Olsen: A Reminiscence
Thursday, April 13th, 2023 Blog,Try as I might, I can’t remember the first time I met John Olsen, although it must have been in the mid-1980s. What I do recall is that even then, he was self-consciously the great man of Australian art – especially after the recent deaths of Fred Williams and Russell Drysdale. As the years rolled […]
John Olsen 1928 – 2023
Thursday, April 13th, 2023 Blog,Hearing that John Olsen is no more is like learning that Uluru has disappeared overnight. A towering presence in Australian art, a larger-than-life personality, Olsen has been a dominant figure in our cultural landscape from the 1960s until the present. Although 95 can be considered a good innings, the artist may have spoiled his own […]
Museum Dreaming
Friday, April 7th, 2023 Blog,When it comes to cultural matters, Australia is the land of wishful thinking. The entire rationale behind the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern Project, valued at $344 million, was “build it and they will come”. After three months this is already looking like a pipe dream. The former NSW Government’s planned destruction of the […]
One Week in the Pilbara
Saturday, January 7th, 2023 Blog,“What do you think of the Pilbara?” asked the hotel manager in Newman. “A lot of red dirt?” The immediate answer was: “Yes. A vast, seemingly endless expanse of red dirt, criss-crossed by trains carrying identically formed hillocks of iron ore. The trains stretch for kilometres at a time. You see them on the horizon, […]
Nicholas Harding 1956 – 2022
Friday, November 11th, 2022 Blog,When Nicholas Harding was awarded the 2022 Wynne Prize for landscape, one sensed it wasn’t simply a vote for a single painting, but for a lifetime’s achievement. This is not to detract from that winning canvas, Eora, a vast bushland scene, almost 2 by 4 metres – a scale that might have intimidated most artists, […]
The Archibald Prize 2022: Blak Douglas is the winner
Saturday, May 14th, 2022 Blog,Politics is never far away from the Archibald prize, but it’s often that nebulous strain called “art politics”. This year, with the winner being announced in the middle of a federal election campaign, it was always going to be hard to keep attention focused on the aesthetics. Blak Douglas (AKA. Adam Hill), proved to be […]
Peter Powditch: Remarks at a Memorial Exhibition
Friday, May 13th, 2022 Blog,I feel like a bit of a fraud opening Peter Powditch’s memoral show, when so many other people in this room knew him a lot better than I did. – I didn’t ‘get’ Peter’s work at all when I first encountered it and didn’t meet him until some time after I’d first written – rather […]