Tag: Australian art
Archibald Prize 2012
Saturday, March 31st, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,At that dreaded time of year when the Archibald Prize rolls around, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW strap on their armour and prepare to be criticised, condemned, lampooned and humiliated. Admittedly they often bring this fate on themselves by their choice of a show or a winner. The only difference this time […]
Mike Parr, Denise Green, Art Month
Saturday, March 24th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,Three weeks in, Art Month keeps rolling. The wine is still being sipped, the eager crowds scramble from one gallery to the next; the chatter is relentless. There’s always something else to say about Art, even if each new pronouncement tends to contradict the previous one. The unresolved issue hanging over this collective love-in for […]
Sunset over Cottesloe
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 Art Essays, Australian Art, Blog, General Art Essays,As half of the Sydney art world celebrated the launch of Art Month, and the other half clinked glasses at a valedictory show of Margaret Olley’s work, I was on Cottesloe Beach watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean. It was the eighth incarnation of Sculpture by the Sea in Western Australia, and I […]
Parallel Collisions: The 2012 Adelaide Biennial
Saturday, March 10th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays, International Art,“We love language,” confessed the curators of Parallel Collisions: the 12th Adelaide Biennial. This may not sound controversial – for the purposes of communication it’s very useful. It was only as I read through the boxed, brick-heavy catalogue for this exhibition that I began to feel Natasha Bullock and Alexie Glass-Kantor may love language not […]
Russell Drysdale: The Drawings
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,When Lou Klepac tells us that Russell Drysdale “was always reluctant to get on with painting or even drawing,” it is the merest understatement. Of all the Australian artists who have made a lasting contribution to the national culture, Drysdale was the least driven by either ambition or compulsion. This year is the hundredth anniversary […]
Love Lace
Saturday, February 25th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,Over the past few years the Powerhouse Museum has attracted plenty of critics, but turn up on a Saturday and the place is full of people. Does this mean the criticisms are baseless – the mere bleating of snobs and elitists? Well no, actually. Since its grand opening in 1988, the building has always been […]
Fred Sandback; Wim Delvoye; Abstract Canvas; Philip King
Saturday, February 18th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays, International Art,Over the years Andrew Jensen has edged his way north, starting in Christchurch, moving to Wellington, on to Auckland, and last year crossing national lines and arriving in Sydney. What makes the Jensen Gallery unusual is that the exhibition program consists of 70-80 per cent international art – the kind of art we normally only […]
Geoff Dyer, Stephen Bird, Etsuko Fukaya, Joanna Braithwaite
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,When Thoreau wrote: “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, he probably wasn’t thinking about art dealers. Yet the phrase springs to mind when one considers the sluggishness of the commercial art scene over the past couple of years. While the art market weathered the GFC better than was generally expected, an extended […]
Impressions: Painting Light & Life
Saturday, February 4th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,A survey of portraiture by Australian artists of the late nineteenth century would seem to be long overdue. Despite the institutional obsession with all things contemporary, the works of the so-called Australian Impressionists – Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Fred McCubbin and Charles Conder – remain the most popular drawcards in our public collections. The problem […]
Robert Malherbe, Rhys Lee, Peter Godwin & Guan Wei
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays,There is a romantic expectation that an artist will keep producing works that are wholly original. This can create a debilitating pressure, as some feel obliged to produce a new twist with every exhibition. But art is not created in a vacuum, and all artists take something from their predecessors. As Picasso is famously alleged […]