Sydney Morning Herald Column
Janet Laurence: After Nature
Thursday, March 21st, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“What need has nature of thought, of care?” asked Confucius in the 5thC. BCE. “Plenty” is the answer he’d receive today, as we struggle with the effects of global warming, deforrestation, salination, loss of species and habitat. In the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ era nature needs all the help it can get. Having worked so dilgently to […]
Quilty
Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It’s often said that having a lot of enemies must mean you’re doing something right. Ben Quilty discovered long ago that the price of fame for an artist is the undying enmity of a large proportion of one’s peers. This hasn’t put the brakes on his glorious ascent but neither has it left him unscarred. […]
Hassall Collection
Thursday, March 7th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Last week I had occasion to reflect at length on that strange beast, the art collector. The immediate stimulus was a talk at Artspace during a private view of the Michael Hobbs Collection. The late Michael Hobbs was a mainstay of the Sydney art scene for many decades, and his children are honouring his legacy […]
Perth Festival Art 2019
Thursday, February 28th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In 2018 the Art Gallery of Western Australia chose to opt out of the Perth Festival. This year AGWA has made an impressive comeback with Desert River Sea: Portraits of the Kimberley – the stand-out event in the 2019 visual arts program. It’s an exhibition that has been six years in the making, and the […]
Heaven and Earth in Chinese Art
Friday, February 22nd, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Instead of asking: “How are you?”, the Chinese might greet you with words: “Have you eaten?” If ever one required confirmation of the Chinese love of food please note that the most famous and popular works in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, are two miraculous carvings: one of a cabbage, the other a piece of […]
Minimalism.Space.Light.Object.
Thursday, February 14th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Singapore’s National Gallery is in that honeymoon phase the National Gallery of Australia enjoyed in its early days. Inaugural director, Eugene Tan, has encouraged his curators to set the agenda, resulting in a highly original series of exhibitions exploring the art of South-East Asia and its relationship to the rest of the world. The Gallery […]
Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate
Friday, February 8th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Exhibition titles are of the same order of marketing as those advertisements that claim by signing up for some course you can make millions or learn to speak another language in two weeks. Naturally if you don’t succeed it’s always your own fault. So when we come across a show titled Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite […]
Destination Sydney re-imagined
Thursday, January 31st, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In summer 2015 three of the city’s leading public galleries combined forces to stage an exhibition called Destination Sydney, bringing together work by nine prominent local artists, past and present. Although it would be hard to think of a less inspiring title the show seemed to work. At the very least it worked well enough […]
Taipei Dangdai Art Fair 2019
Thursday, January 24th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Taiwan is only 180 kilometres from the coast of China but it displays an utterly different cast of mind. So when President Xi Jinping unleashed another round of sabre rattling rhetoric this month, declaring that Taiwan “must and will be” reunited with the mainland, one thinks instinctively of what might be lost rather than gained. […]
Nongirrna Marawili
Friday, January 18th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A talking point with the Tony Tuckson show at the Art Gallery of NSW is that the artist’s first solo exhibition came at the age of 48. Most of today’s art students would probably think anyone who leaves it so late must be doomed to failure. At nearly 50, surely one should be thinking about […]