Tag: Australian art
Art and Seoul
Thursday, October 20th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog, International Art,Regular readers must be starting to wonder in what part of the world they’ll find themselves from week to week. I’m starting to wonder myself. Recently I was in Seoul for the 10th Korean International Art Fair, today I’m on a plane coming back from Shanghai. Without wanting to sound glib, the very fact that […]
Leon Kossoff, Ben Quilty and James Powditch
Saturday, October 30th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,Looking at recent reports on the Paris art fair, FIAC, it was morbidly interesting to learn about the most eye-catching works and the prices they fetched. For instance, Barry X Ball’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite – a black marble quotation of a famous Roman sculpture, went for US$ 623,000. A bronze sculpture by Paul McCarthy, with the […]
National Gallery of Australia: A New Extension
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Australian Art, General Art Essays,Nobody in Australia is more experienced in the ways of gallery building than Andrew Andersons, the chief architect of the new wing at the National Gallery of Australia. Although he is a super professional, Andersons has often been criticised by other architects who find his buildings prosaic, deficient in detail and artistry. To be fair, […]
The Blake Prize
Monday, September 20th, 2010 Art Column,If all religion were as vague and non-descript as the works in the Blake Prize, the world would be a much more peaceful place. Nobody could ever be passionate, let alone fanatical, about the lame and timid entries in Australia’s leading competition for religious art. Or should that be ‘spiritual’ art? This is the 59th […]
Slow Burn, Charles Blackman
Saturday, September 11th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art,Hopefully it won’t be viewed as a sign of ingrained male chauvinism that I’ve taken so long to talk about Slow Burn: A century of Australian women artists from a private collection, at the S.H.Ervin Gallery. The exhibition, which is proving extremely popular, is due to run for another week. There has been a […]
Curious Colony
Saturday, August 7th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art,In 1814, Newcastle was “a forlorn cluster of makeshift buildings whose sole purpose was to provide shelter and basic necessities for the inhabitants.” This assessment, by historian Elizabeth Ellis, is uncontroversial. For the 305 white settlers – including 249 convicts – who made their homes in this isolated outpost, perhaps the only solace was to […]
Jeffrey Smart
Saturday, June 26th, 2010 Art Column,There is a science fiction aspect to the Australian art market at the moment, with commercial galleries inhabiting parallel universes. Most dealers have struggled to sell anything substantial for much of this year, but every so often a show comes along that sparks a feeding frenzy. Rex Irwin’s current selection of paintings and drawings by […]
Hans Heysen and Marion Borgelt
Sunday, June 20th, 2010 Art Column,Travelling to the Flinders Ranges last year with a group of artists, I read my way through Colin Thiele’s Heysen of Hahndorf (1968) the standard biography of Australia’s most celebrated gum tree Meister. Sir Hans Heysen (1877-1968) was the first artist to make Australians aware of the rugged beauty of the Flinders region, with a […]
Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 Australian Art, Book Reviews,Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67 By Kathie Sutherland Looking through a recent auction catalogue I was struck by the estimate given for a picture of a blue and white bird by Brett Whiteley. This attractive but undoubtedly minor work is expected to sell for $500,000-$700,000 – a ludicrous sum for a painting that would […]
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 […]