Tag: Australian art
Fred Williams in the You Yangs
Thursday, September 21st, 2017 Art Column,Last year the Geelong Art Gallery held an exemplary survey of Arthur Streeton’s paintings made in Victoria’s Western Districts from 1920-32. The exhibition was a swansong for retiring director, Geoffrey Edwards. This year the gallery has marked the arrival of new director, Jason Smith, with a show of comparable importance: Fred Williams in the You […]
Sydney Contemporary 2017
Friday, September 15th, 2017 Art Column,It was both pleasing and wryly amusing to learn that sales at this year’s Sydney Contemporary Art Fair topped $16 million. For a commercial gallery sector feeling unloved and unvisited this figure represents a resounding endorsement. Nevertheless, before breaking out the champagne it’s worth putting that achievement into perspective with a glance at Day One […]
Jenny Watson
Friday, September 8th, 2017 Art Column,One imagines teachers at the Julian Ashton Art School sending their pupils across the road to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to see Jenny Watson: The Fabric of Fantasy. For the traditionally-minded it’s an object lesson in how not to make art. If there are any cynics among those students, they might say: “…nevertheless, it […]
The Public Body.02
Friday, August 18th, 2017 Art Column,Our age is one of unprecedented permissiveness and militant puritanism. Pornography of every description is available at the click of a keyboard, small children are sexualised in a manner that would have been inconceivable to our grandparents’ generation. Yet Newton’s third law applies in psychology as well as science: for every action, there is an […]
Salon des Refusés 2017
Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 Art Column,Every year I nurture a dim fantasy of a Salon des Refusés bristling with masterpieces rejected from the Archibald and Wynne Prizes by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Every year I relinquish this thought almost as soon as I step into the S.H.Ervin Gallery. The Refusés was a great idea when it […]
The 2017 Archibald Prize
Friday, July 28th, 2017 Art Column,By the usual Archibald Prize standards 2017 is a low key year. There are plenty of neat, correct entries, a touch of quirkiness, a bit of thick impasto, but nothing to get the pulse racing with delight or indignation. Unless, perhaps, you’re a lunatic right-winger who starts to foam at the mouth at the merest […]
Mad Love
Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 Art Column,Although we live in a world in which the ugliest forms of nationalism seem to be making a comeback there is one partial antidote: cultural exchange. As we become progressively more familiar with the art, music, film, fashion and cuisine of another country, the fear and suspicion of the Other is diminished. Japan, for instance, […]
Farewell Stills
Saturday, July 15th, 2017 Blog,Twenty-six years is a long time to be running a commercial gallery, let alone a gallery specialising in photography. When Kathy Freedman and her partners close Stills Gallery in mid-July, it will spell the end of a long adventure in convincing Sydney audiences that photography is art. Stills began life in a Paddington terrace house […]
Wendy Loefler 1950-2017
Friday, July 7th, 2017 Blog,In the weeks leading up to her exhibition at Australian Galleries in Melbourne, Wendy Loefler emailed me about the work she had been doing over the past two years. “It’s fairly unusual and considerably more ambitious than my usual fare. I’m making one continuous immersive desert landscape in the round, on twelve abutting large canvasses.” […]
O'Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism
Friday, July 7th, 2017 Art Column,There are exhibitions that sound marvellous in theory but somehow fail to measure up when they make it to the gallery walls. O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism at the Art Gallery of NSW is an almost perfect example. As one of those projects that puts Australian artists on equal terms with a better known […]