Sydney Morning Herald Column
Andrew Sullivan
Tuesday, January 12th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,All children seem to be mad about dinosaurs, many of us never outgrowing that fascination. Dinosaur exhibitions are among the best attended events at international museums, while there have been five films in the Jurassic Park franchise since 1990, with another in the pipeline. Anyone requiring a dinosaur hit over the holidays might consider a trip […]
Paradise on Earth
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Marion Mahony Griffin has long stood in the shadow of her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, but nowadays the couple are viewed as a partnership, rather like Christo and Jeanne-Claude. In Paradise on Earth, the Museum of Sydney celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of a formidably talented woman. It’s ironic that the MoS has […]
Peter Kingston: First Light
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Before seeing Peter Kingston: First Light at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, I was reminded that the late Giles Auty once compared ‘Kingo’ to Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). Although I would hesitate to endorse most of Giles’s observations about art and life, he may have been onto something. Although the Frenchman commands a place in the pantheon of […]
Just Not Australian
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Just Not Australian made its debut at Artspace early last year but will be touring ten regional galleries in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia until October, 2022. I caught the show at the Wollongong Art Gallery where it may be seen over the holiday period. The longevity of the tour suggests this is […]
Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2020
Tuesday, December 1st, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Most children draw instinctively as a way of understanding and taking control of the world. If the great majority of us stop drawing at a certain age it’s not because we have attained a level of mastery. On the contrary, at around 9 or 10, so psychologists tell us, we become self-critical, feeling we don’t […]
Karl Wiebke, Ebony Russell, Lea Ferris & Dave Teer
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It’s almost impossible to imagine ‘pure’ abstraction in art but Karl Wiebke takes us to the brink. His Seven Paintings at Liverpool Street Gallery avoid all the usual associations we habitually attach to an abstract work, being not suggestive of landscapes, figures, or architectonic details such as doors or windows. So what do we see? […]
Joshua Yeldham, Dagmar Cyrulla, Indonesia Calling 2020
Tuesday, November 17th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“I’ve always been interested in how the eye is the trail to the soul, and how my soul projected can look like a painting,” says Joshua Yeldham in a short film he has made for his exhibition, Providence, at Arthouse Gallery. There’s a popular belief that artists are unworldly beings who live in their own […]
Michael Zavros, Gunybi Ganambarr, Li Jin
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Michael Zavros is a very 21st century artist. Known for a fastidious, hyperreal style of painting and a preoccupation with fashion and luxury goods, he would have been anathema in those days when the avant-garde strove to make art that was not a marketable commodity. Marketability is Zavros’s great and abiding theme, although he comes […]
The Wynne Prize 2020
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A visitor to the Art Gallery of NSW has written to me, saying that after living through last year’s horror bushfires on the south coast, he was surprised at the lack of fire paintings in the Wynne Prize. He was also disappointed that the Salon des Refusés seemed to ignore the bushfire crisis, although it […]
Les Sculpture Refusées & Sculpture in the Vineyards – Wollombi Valley Sculpture Festival
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,At this time of any other year Sydney is getting ready for its regular fix of Sculpture by the Sea (SXS), one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the cultural calendar. But like so many things in the era of COVID-19, the thought of hundreds of thousands of people rubbing shoulders on the trail […]