Blog
Guy Warren 100 not out
Wednesday, April 14th, 2021 Blog,Australia’s oldest artist, Guy Warren, is getting tired of being asked: “What’s the secret of a long life?” His answer is very simple: “You just have to keep living.” When Warren gets down to detail he says it’s a matter of “good genes, good luck and a whiskey every night.” Beyond that he doesn’t know […]
Monet: Larger & Lighter
Friday, April 2nd, 2021 Blog,There are worse ways to spend an hour than being surrounded by gigantic projections of Impressionist paintings while listening to the greatest hits of the Belle Époque, but don’t imagine that Monet & Friends – Life, Light and Colour is an art exhibition. This audio-visual extravaganza is a spectacle with one foot in the past, […]
Santiago Sierra: Union Flag
Friday, March 26th, 2021 Blog,If Santiago Sierra had decided to go to Charlottesville, Virginia, and soak the Stars and Stripes in native American or African American blood he would have had the most explosive artwork in the world. In the United States the flag is a sacred talisman for nationalist groups, including every form of extremist. Can one begin […]
Botticelli to Van Gogh
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 Blog,Why Botticelli? In an exhibition in which the first room includes remarkable paintings by Titian, Tintoretto and Savoldo, Botticelli’s Four scenes from the early life of Saint Zenobius (c.1500) is not exactly a highlight. The painting belongs to a class of decoration called spalliere – a long, horizontal panel that was inserted into a wall […]
Fare thee well, Liz Ann
Saturday, March 6th, 2021 Blog,Retiring after 22 years at the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Liz Ann Macgregor still inspires mixed feelings. She arrived in 1999 in a burst of Scottish exotica, a veritable blur of tartan, and says she is now returning from whence she came. Possibly Macgregor’s most notable achievement was to steer the institution […]
2020: The Year in Review
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021 Blog,In March last year a friend in Bangladesh forwarded a news item that said Australia’s borders would be closed until September. “Is it true!!!!” he exclaimed. I was sceptical and replied that neither the economy nor people’s limits of endurance would allow the closures to last that long. I thought we’d be flying again within […]
Swimming Pools: Deep & Shallow
Friday, February 5th, 2021 Blog,When David Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964 it was the swimming pools that made the most vivid impression. He had noticed them from the air – thousands of small patches of bright blue. No desirable Hollywood property was complete without one. The swimming pools of LA were the most tangible point of difference […]
Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
Friday, January 15th, 2021 Blog,In The Ghost of Wombeyan Alex Seton has created a life-sized marble figure that lies prone on a slab beneath a heavy shroud. Should we see it as a body, or merely the impression of a body preserved in solid marble? Either way, the piece has a strong funereal connotation. The ‘ghost’ is a childhood […]
The Art Market in the Time of COVID
Tuesday, December 1st, 2020 Blog,A new Australian auction record for Brett Whiteley’s painting, Henri’s Armchair, puts the star on top of the Christmas tree for the local art market in a year when only doom and gloom were predicted. Indeed, one local auction supremo tells me that things have never been better. The plague year 2020 has seen a […]
Know My Name: A First Look
Thursday, November 19th, 2020 Blog,If the phrase Know My Name makes you think of the theme song of a James Bond movie, you’re a prime candidate for the National Gallery of Australia’s new survey of Australian women artists, 1900 to the present. You might even draw a twinge of masculine panic from Chris Cornell’s lyric: The odds will betray […]