Tag: Australian art
The Archibald Prize in Ten Pictures
Tuesday, June 14th, 2022 Art Column,No fewer than 816 works were entered in this year’s Archibald Prize, with 52 being selected as finalists. I should be used to it by now, but I’m still amazed that so many artists plunge in, year after year, in the forlorn hope of making it into the charmed circle that hangs at the Art […]
Peter Powditch: Remarks at a Memorial Exhibition
Friday, May 13th, 2022 Blog,I feel like a bit of a fraud opening Peter Powditch’s memoral show, when so many other people in this room knew him a lot better than I did. – I didn’t ‘get’ Peter’s work at all when I first encountered it and didn’t meet him until some time after I’d first written – rather […]
Ken Whisson 1927 – 2022
Friday, May 6th, 2022 Blog,Ken Whisson was one of the great originals of Australian art. Had he ever become a household name he would have felt something was wrong. Whisson had no desire to live or paint in a conventional way. Like Giacometti, even when he began to sell work for higher prices he continued to live like a […]
2022 Biennale of Sydney: rīvus
Tuesday, April 26th, 2022 Art Column,When he began to plan the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, this year’s director, José Roca, thought of Australia as a hot, dry country in which water was a precious resource. By the time the show got underway, a month ago, Sydney was well into its wettest March on record. Since then, the clouds and rain […]
Steve Lopes Encountered
Saturday, April 16th, 2022 Art Column,“What a lot of rubbish!”, I thought, looking at Steve Lopes Encountered – not the paintings but the subject matter. Lopes shows us a world covered in litter. His pictures are filled with dead leaves, bits of paper, fragments of rock or broken tile, the odd bottle, and lots of small, coloured patches that might […]
Adelaide Biennial 2022: Free/State
Tuesday, March 29th, 2022 Art Column,Sebastian Goldspink is pioneering a new model of curatorship – the sensitive, caring custodian. At the opening of the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Goldspink seemed to waver on the brink of tears every time he had to make a speech, which, as guest curator, was pretty […]
Peter Powditch 1942 – 2022
Sunday, March 27th, 2022 Blog,Few contemporary Australian artists become well-known names, but Peter Powditch had his 15 minutes of fame. In 1972 the Sydney Morning Herald was putting together a front page feature on who was going to win that year’s rugby league grand final and Powditch was one of the celebrities contacted for an opinion. In later years […]
23rd Sydney Biennale: A Brief Guide
Tuesday, March 15th, 2022 Art Column,Preparations for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney were well underway before somebody noticed this year’s theme – rīvus – was an anagram of “virus”. For director, José Roca, who has worked to assemble a vast international show in a locked-down world, it would have been impossible to ignore the pandemic. Roca is from Columbia but […]
Destination Sydney 2022
Tuesday, February 15th, 2022 Art Column,As a title, Destination Sydney, is not sounding any better with age, but this third installment of the show is reputedly the last. As with the exhibitions in 2015 and 2018, it’s a collaboration between three of Sydney’s leading public venues: the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Mosman Art Gallery, and the Manly Museum and Art Gallery, […]
Jutta Feddersen 1931 – 2021
Thursday, February 10th, 2022 Blog,Jutta Feddersen, who has died peacefully at the age of 90, belonged to a generation whose lives were permanently shaped and scarred by the Second World War. Born in 1931, in a German town called Briesen that is now part of Poland, Jutta Schley enjoyed an idyllic rural childhood. One of five children, she was […]