Tag: Australian art
One week in Darwin
Saturday, August 17th, 2013 Art Column,Darwin will always be a frontier town, but at this time of year it is the most cultured place in Australia. Enjoying a brief window of perfect dry season weather, the Darwin Festival has become a keenly anticipated event, with a lively mix of local and international acts. Because the Northern Territory is the heartland […]
Kevin Connor, Ricky Swallow & 'Found'
Saturday, August 10th, 2013 Art Column,Kevin Connor’s paintings aren’t pretty but they are attractive, having the peculiar magnetism of anything done with no thought of an audience or a peer group. This only begins to seem like a virtue when one thinks of all the art made as part of a career strategy, or by those who want to be […]
Peter Rushforth
Saturday, August 3rd, 2013 Art Column,Pottery today is in a paradoxical position. Alongside the wraparound videos, sculptural installations and performance works favoured by the contemporary art museums it seems decidedly unsexy. Yet stand in a gallery in front of a great pot and it is hard to think of anything more sensual, more engaging, more reflective of the human hand […]
Sydney Moderns
Saturday, July 20th, 2013 Art Column,When an artist calls a work A Painted Picture of the Universe it means he’s thinking big. It’s rather a grand title for a small abstraction, even if it did take Roy De Maistre 14 years to complete this cosmological fantasy. De Maistre (1894-1968) is one of the central figures in Sydney Moderns: Art for […]
Philip Wolfhagen
Saturday, July 13th, 2013 Art Column,To appreciate the art of Philip Wolfhagen one must be tolerant of repetition. Few Australian artists are more devoted to the serial approach to painting: fastening on to a particular motif, making small changes in colour and tone on successive canvases until the theme is exhausted. For Wolfhagen’s fans the process is mesmeric, for his […]
Jeffrey Smart 1921-2013
Saturday, June 22nd, 2013 Art Column,Although he assumed an imposing stature in his later years, Jeffrey Smart was a grafter not a dasher. A careful, methodical craftsman, he had little respect for painters such as Sidney Nolan who might produce dozens of canvases in a week. For Smart a painting had to be constructed with the same care that an […]
South of no North
Saturday, April 6th, 2013 Art Column,South of no North may seem an enigmatic title for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but a moment’s reflection provides clarity. The name of this show, which brings together the work of Laurence Aberhart, William Eggleston and Noel McKenna, is borrowed from a book of short stories by Charles Bukowski (1916-1994). This […]
Angus Nivison: A Survey
Saturday, January 12th, 2013 Art Column,For those of us who spend their lives going in and out of art galleries there’s nothing better than being surprised. Before entering Angus Nivison’s survey at the S.H. Ervin Gallery I felt entirely familiar with this artist’s work. I’d even written a preface for the catalogue when the exhibition debuted at the Tamworth Regional […]
Shen Jiawei: Brothers and Sisters
Saturday, December 15th, 2012 Art Column,In the mythology of Maoist China no event is more important than The Long March. It is the foundation story of the People’s Republic even if there is no separating fact from fiction. The March began in October 1934 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was driven out of the small republic it had established […]
Jun Chen, John Walker & Shona Wilson
Saturday, December 8th, 2012 Art Column,Artwork of the week, on a trip around the commercial venues, was Michael Callaghan’s AK47 – Weapon of Choice, at the Damien Minton Gallery. A three metre-high machine gun, made from 17 layers of candy-coloured plywood, this monument to murder leant nonchalantly against a wall in an exhibition called Merchants of Death. It was a […]