Tag: Australian artist

So Long, Guy
Friday, July 26th, 2024 Blog,When I spoke to Guy Warren three years ago, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, I walked away feeling like I’d never felt following an interview. I felt energised. Talking to Guy, 100 not out, and so full of life he could have kept going all day, I realised that if I managed to […]

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 […]

Blaze
Friday, August 26th, 2022 Film Reviews,It was inevitable that Del Kathryn Barton’s debut feature, Blaze, would gather a swag of rave responses. Every new Australian film, no matter how bleak, depressing or sadistic, finds plenty of people willing to sing its praises. Too often this compulsive need to support the local product only helps perpetuate the artistic mediocrity that has […]

Patrick Hall
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,A popular way of praising an Australian artist is to proclaim that his or work should be better known overseas. It’s ironic that Hobart-based artist, Patrick Hall, is probably better known overseas than he is on the other side of Bass Strait. Steven Joyce of Despard Gallery has shown Hall’s work at the renowned Chicago […]

Acute misfortune (for the viewer)
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,When viewers of Acute Misfortune first catch sight of Daniel Henshall playing artist maudit, Adam Cullen, they may experience a flash of déjà vu. The quiet, menacing tones of John Bunting, mastermind of the Snowtown serial murders, are back on air. Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011) is a movie I have no desire to watch again, […]

Suzanne Archer
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,In Wedderburn, on the outskirts of Sydney, the temperature was moving towards 40 degrees. Despite the fans, Suzanne Archer’s bush studio felt like an oven – the heat and glare of an Australian summer providing a strange backdrop for a body of work that has been growing darker, denser, ever more gothic in character. The […]

Looby
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,“He’s due for a late flowering,” says artist, McLean Edwards. “I just wish he hadn’t burnt so many bridges on the way.” One of those bridges is Mclean himself, who has already told us he no longer has any relationship with Keith Looby. It made me think: “Do I have any sort of relationship with […]

Guan Wei
Friday, November 8th, 2019 Art Column,This is Guan Wei month in Sydney, with the Museum of Contemporary Art displaying its holdings of this popular Chinese-Australian artist; the University of Western Sydney hosting an exhibition at its Parramatta South Campus, and Martin Browne Contemporary showing new work. Not many artists can say they’ve had three exhibitions running sumultaneously in the same […]

Tarnanthi 2019
Thursday, October 24th, 2019 Art Column,Since its inception in 2015, Tarnanthi has rapidly become one of this country’s essential art events. The word, in the Kaurna language of the Adelaide Plains means “to rise, come forth, spring up or appear,” but a more appropriate verb might be: “to mushroom”. The major attraction of this sprawling festival of indigenous culture is […]