Tag: Australian art
Jeffrey Smart, Ticket Boxes, Catania (1964)
Friday, December 16th, 2022 Journals,There’s a peculiar melancholy about an empty space designed to accommodate a crowd. Anybody who has ever visited a resort town out-of-season can testify to the sense of desolation one feels in such places, in which shops, restaurants and hotels are geared to the needs of tourists and pleasure-seekers. The brazen trappings of the leisure […]
Sydney Modern Opens at Last
Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 Art Column,According to Premier, Dominic Perrottet, Sydney’s newest cultural attraction is set to be not only the greatest gallery in Australia, but the greatest in the world. Forget about the Louvre, the Met or the Prado, here’s Sydney Modern! This informed and thoughtful opinion was largely echoed by the other speakers at the media preview, with […]
Nicholas Harding 1956 – 2022
Friday, November 11th, 2022 Blog,When Nicholas Harding was awarded the 2022 Wynne Prize for landscape, one sensed it wasn’t simply a vote for a single painting, but for a lifetime’s achievement. This is not to detract from that winning canvas, Eora, a vast bushland scene, almost 2 by 4 metres – a scale that might have intimidated most artists, […]
Sculpture by the Sea 2022
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022 Art Column,There may be no better indicator that Sydney has shaken off its COVID-19 anxieties than a new installment of Sculpture by the Sea. This wildly popular event went missing during the pandemic, but is set for a triumphant return, as crowds gather on the foreshores between Bondi and Tamarama to pick up where they left […]
Cressida Campbell
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022 Art Column,If there were ever an exhibition to silence the doubters and vanquish the sceptics, this is it. Director Nick Mitzevich says there were some at the National Gallery of Australia who couldn’t understand why he wanted to do a Cressida Campbell show. Surely, she’s just a still life artist, a maker of pretty pictures for […]
Vivienne Binns: On and through the surface
Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 Art Column,For one reason or another, it’s taken me a long time to get around to Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it’s an exhibition that reveals a lot about the way a reputation is built. Nowadays Binns (b.1940) is virtually a national living treasure, but she has […]
Jeffrey Smart: Portrait of Germaine Greer (1984)
Thursday, September 15th, 2022 Journals,It’s a testimony to the public perception of Germaine Greer that viewers are surprised Jeffrey Smart has made her seem so prim, so demure. Surely, the outspoken author of The Female Eunuch (1970) should be shown making some provocative gesture, staring challengingly at the viewer. Instead, Smart has portrayed the 45-year-old Greer sitting stiffly on […]
Brett Whiteley: Self-Portrait (1977)
Thursday, September 15th, 2022 Journals,Brett Whiteley was never shy when it came to measuring himself against the masters. At the age of 16, while boarding at Scots College in Bathurst, he came across a book on Vincent Van Gogh and painted a self-portrait in emulation of the famously misunderstood Dutchman. At 16 we are all misunderstood and ready to […]
Shaken to His Core: Nolan’s Auschwitz
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022 Art Column,Auschwitz holds a special place in the modern imagination, being synonymous with a horror that defies the descriptive powers of art. It was the largest of the Nazi extermination camps, responsible for the deaths of more than 1.1 million people. It inspired the German intellectual, T.W. Adorno, to famously declare: “to write poetry after Auschwitz […]
Colin Lanceley: Earthly Delights
Tuesday, July 5th, 2022 Art Column,For more than a thousand years the west was obsessed with the classical culture of Greece and Rome. In the cyber-age of today when all knowledge is available on the mobile phone, we can barely remember the cultural achievements of the past twenty years. This is partly because those who have been entrusted to preserve […]