Tag: Australian art
Ramsay Art Prize 2023
Tuesday, June 13th, 2023 Art Column,To the best of my knowledge, until late last month there had never been a major Australian art prize awarded to a performance piece. It had to happen eventually, and the breakthrough moment came at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where local girl, Ida Sophia, took out the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize, for her […]
Salon des Refusés 2023
Tuesday, May 16th, 2023 Art Column,With more than 900 entries in this year’s Archibald Prize competition, one might imagine there would be a surfeit of masterpieces left over for the Salon des Refusés. Yet somehow, despite the obligatory breathless enthusiasm the Archibald generates in press and public, those great paintings never seem to show up, either at the Art Gallery […]
Julia Gutman is the Winner
Friday, May 5th, 2023 Blog,This year’s Archibald Prize is a victory for youth. A 29-year-old artist has painted – or rather stitched – a portrait of a 27-year-old pop star. It’s not the worst work in the show, but I wouldn’t have called it as the best. My first impression of this year’s selection was that it was exceptionally […]
Archibald Prize 2023
Friday, May 5th, 2023 Art Column,Of all the Archibald Prizes I’ve seen and reviewed, this year’s version is the most difficult to pick. it’s usually easy to spot the winner within five minutes – even when, as is often the case, it may not be the best picture. This year I confess myself bamboozled. One feels a certain sympathy for […]
The National 4: New Australian Art
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023 Art Column,Surveys of contemporary art are rarely smooth, coherent affairs and The National 4: Australian Art Now is no exception. In her catalogue essay, Jennifer Higgie tries to answer the unanswerable question: “What is Australian contemporary art?” and comes up with a long list of contradictory propositions. It’s not exactly revelatory, but it makes the point […]
John Olsen: A Reminiscence
Thursday, April 13th, 2023 Blog,Try as I might, I can’t remember the first time I met John Olsen, although it must have been in the mid-1980s. What I do recall is that even then, he was self-consciously the great man of Australian art – especially after the recent deaths of Fred Williams and Russell Drysdale. As the years rolled […]
John Olsen 1928 – 2023
Thursday, April 13th, 2023 Blog,Hearing that John Olsen is no more is like learning that Uluru has disappeared overnight. A towering presence in Australian art, a larger-than-life personality, Olsen has been a dominant figure in our cultural landscape from the 1960s until the present. Although 95 can be considered a good innings, the artist may have spoiled his own […]
Fantastic Forms at Bundanon
Tuesday, April 11th, 2023 Art Column,When Bundanon received $2.4 million in the federal budget it was widely viewed as an endorsement of this rural arts oasis, gifted to the nation by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd in 1993. The unspoken reason for the grant was sheer survival: like so many institutions under the Morrison government, Bundanon, located in bushland near Nowra, […]
Museum Dreaming
Friday, April 7th, 2023 Blog,When it comes to cultural matters, Australia is the land of wishful thinking. The entire rationale behind the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern Project, valued at $344 million, was “build it and they will come”. After three months this is already looking like a pipe dream. The former NSW Government’s planned destruction of the […]
William & Jonathan Delafield Cook, Luke Sciberras, David Collins, Danelle Bergstrom
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 Art Column,William Delafield Cook (1936-2015) was the perfect expatriate artist. He left Australia in the late 1950s, and would spend most of his life in London, where he blended in smoothly with the British art scene. His paintings, however, returned perpetually to Australia. In this, he was like Sidney Nolan, although their work was poles apart. […]