Tag: abstract art
Not the Way Home, Damaged
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,In recent years there has been a spate of projects in which a group of artists are taken to some far-flung location and invited to respond to a new environment. The end result is a group exhibition that gathers together works made on the spot, and those created afterwards in the studio from memories, sketches […]
Abstraction
Saturday, September 17th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,Among the unsolicited art emails that appear in my mail-box every week, one recent posting came from the Martos Gallery in New York, who were holding an exhibition called We Regret to Inform You There is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting. The image that came with the email showed this sentence written […]
David Aspden
Friday, August 26th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Like Tom Roberts before him, David Aspden (1935-2005) was born in rural England and arrived in Australia around the age of fifteen. This is a time of life when the biggest part of one’s adult personality is already formed. Roberts, who grew up in the age of Empire, was never quite sure if he was […]
John Hoyland, Charles Nodrum Gallery
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 General Art Essays, International Art,One often reads about an artist’s ‘late style’, an autumnal period where a painter feels his mortality, slows down and mellows his palette. John Hoyland, who will be 77 this year, has obviously never heard of this concept. The paintings Hoyland is producing today are more raw, more free, more experimental than the works he […]
Ildiko Kovacs / Simone Fraser
Thursday, May 19th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,May is becoming a crowded month, with works for the Head On Photo Festival being shown in more than 80 venues across the city. In addition there is a new round of exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, and also a touch of musical chairs. Sullivan and Stumpf relocated to a spacious new venue […]
Enrique Martínez Celaya / Michael Johnson
Saturday, May 7th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,Enrique Martínez Celaya is an overachiever by any standard. An American artist of Cuban extraction, he has been feted and praised as only the United States can fete and praise.
Paul Hopmeier
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 Australian Art,“When we have said that sculpture is not sculptural, not an object, not a game, demonstration, machine, architecture or theatre – what is it? It is a figuration with a presence, a thing of modern lineage, learned about always from previous sculpture, and the idea so passed on to anyone who can get it.” Sidney […]
Paths to Abstraction
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 Art Column,Cézanne’s lesson, according to Picasso, was not to be found in his beautifully painted apples, but in his anxiety. This is echoed in the words of the artist, Paul Signac, who reported that Matisse was “anxious, madly anxious”, in the year of 1905, when the Fauves made their cataclysmic debut at the Salon d’Automne. It […]
Bill Henson David Aspden
Saturday, May 15th, 2010 Art Column,How fleeting and fickle are the excitements generated by the media. In 2008 it seemed as though Australian civilisation was on the brink of disaster because Bill Henson had exhibited photographs of nude teenagers. It made little difference that he had been doing this for almost thirty years already, with the works being shown in […]
McCubbin: Last Impressions & Aida Tomescu
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 Art Column,There can be few more disconcerting feelings than being the only one at a party who isn’t having a good time, but this is roughly how I felt as I wandered through the exhibition, McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907-17, at the National Gallery of Australia. Having never thought much of this period of McCubbin’s work I […]