Tag: Australian art
Fiona Tan, Jon Lewis & Kate Geraghty
Saturday, May 1st, 2010 Art Column,Fiona Tan is almost the perfect multicultural artist. Born in Indonesia of Australian and Chinese parents, brought up in Melbourne, she now resides in the Netherlands. Last year she was the Dutch representative at the Venice Biennale, where her video, Disorient, was one of the best received exhibits in a largely disappointing show. Would it […]
Wilderness
Saturday, April 17th, 2010 Art Column,Looking at Wilderness, a new survey of contemporary painting, at the Art Gallery of NSW, I had the familiar suspicion that the artists had been chosen before the title. The procedure goes something like this: 1. Select a group of artists who seem to be cool enough to appeal to your peer group. 2. Think […]
Salon des Refuses, Wynne & Sulman Prize
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 Art Column,Nothing could make this year’s Archibald Prize exhibition look good, although the Salon des Refusés at the S.H.Ervin Gallery makes it more understandable. After examining those works rejected from the official hang one may feel a twinge of sympathy for the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW who had to work their way through […]
Archibald Prize 2010
Saturday, March 27th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,No form of human activity nowadays comes without the possibility of therapy. Tiger Woods had to call in the specialists over his sex addiction, Michael Clarke has seen a psychologist to get his mind off his personal problems and back onto cricket. When Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generation, counselling services were reputedly made […]
Art Month 2010
Saturday, March 20th, 2010 Art Column,Over a decade ago the well-known Sydney art dealer, Ray Hughes, held a show of sculptured, painted coffins from Ghana made in the shape of a car, a crayfish, a spring onion, and so on. The exhibition attracted unprecedented publicity for a commercial gallery, with reports on TV and radio, and articles in the newspapers […]
Tom Bass Sculpture by the Sea
Saturday, March 13th, 2010 Art Column,Last week the Australia Council revealed the startling statistic that “over 16 million Australians are actively participating in the arts.” According to a recent survey, 22 percent of the population is engaged in making art or craft, while 900,000 people are writing poems. At this point, you may be wondering why our public sphere does […]
Lawrence Daws
Saturday, February 20th, 2010 Art Column,Lawrence Daws had an “early” retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1966, when he was thirty-nine years old. This seems remarkable when one learns that Daws, who born in Adelaide, had his first solo exhibition in 1954. Was he considered such a prodigy that twelve years’ work was enough for a show […]
Martin Sharp
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,There is a double edge to the exhibition title Martin Sharp: Sydney Artist, because Sharp is one of the very few Australian artists who enjoys a worldwide reputation. This is no mean feat for a man who says he has barely left his house for the past forty years. It remains a mystery whether he […]
Nicholas Harding Jeff Mincham
Saturday, January 30th, 2010 Art Column,Paintings may greet the viewer with grand attitudes or ugly looks, but most of them know their limitations. We find ourselves staring at an arrangement of colours and forms on a flat surface that provides an imaginary window onto the world – nature seen through a temperament, to use Zola’s formulation. Having become accustomed to […]
Fiona Foley
Saturday, January 9th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,Fiona Foley is an artist who has benefited from being in the right place at the right time. Having begun exhibiting in the mid-1980s, she is young enough to have missed the great ideological battles that took place in the art of the sixties and seventies. She never had to worry about edges and picture […]