Blog
Climate Artists: Franziska Furter & Julian Charriere
Tuesday, April 16th, 2024 Blog,“My interest in the weather started twenty years ago in Edinburgh,” says Swiss artist, Franziska Furter. “It was my first overseas residency, and I was so surprised. You wake up and it’s raining. You have a shower, the sun is shining. You have breakfast, it’s snowing. Then you go out and it’s raining again. I […]
Jacobus Capone
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024 Blog,In 2007, at the age of 21, Jacobus Capone took a scoop of water from the Indian Ocean, walked across Australia, and emptied it in the Pacific. The journey took five-and-a-half months and killed off any relationship he ever had with his native country. “That was my last university project,” he recalls. “I was very […]
Makoto Azuma
Friday, February 16th, 2024 Blog,Makoto Azuma is the Indiana Jones of florists. He has fired flowers into the stratosphere and plunged them to the bottom of the ocean. One of his favourite tactics is to preserve specimens at their moment of maximum beauty, in blocks of clear resin, which is how visitors to this year’s NGV Triennial at the […]
Elmgreen & Dragset
Friday, December 22nd, 2023 Blog,Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset met in a Copenhagen nightclub in 1994. Elmgreen, a Dane, was writing and performing poetry, while Dragset, a Norwegian, was involved in the theatre. Somehow, they decided to combine forces and make art. (“It’s can be good not to learn how to do things in a ‘correct’ way,” says Dragset.) […]
Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture
Sunday, December 10th, 2023 Blog,Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Jordan Wolfson’s Body Sculpture goes through an elaborate range of gestures in a half hour cycle, from the sexually suggestive to the suicidal. The National Gallery of Australia has invested $6.67 million in this work and waited five-and-a-half years for it to be delivered. Conscious of the magnitude of the gamble […]
Aboriginal Art returns to NYC (Starring Steve Martin)
Saturday, October 14th, 2023 Blog,When Andy Warhol said: “the best museum is Bloomingdale’s,” he was anticipating a day when art was seen as just another commodity, like a kettle or a toaster. Last month the famous showroom windows at Bloomingdale’s on 59thSt. Manhattan, displayed kettles, toasters and expresso machines covered in the distinctive patterns of Western Desert painting. It […]
Sheila Hicks
Saturday, October 14th, 2023 Blog,Not many people get asked by the Louvre to deliver a lecture on tapestries. It seems a reasonable request of an artist who has dominated the field of fibre art for decades, but it’s left Sheila Hicks feeling slightly awkward. While her own star has never been higher, the prestige and authority of the famous […]
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 […]