Tag: contemporary art
Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, Michael Bell, Solomon Kammer
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 Art Column,It’s rare to step into an exhibition and feel bowled over, but this was the case with Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s exhibition, The Little Things, at Roslyn Oxley9. Over the past decade Nyapanyapa has been a shooting star in the indigenous art firmament but with this body of work she has moved onto another plane. It’s tempting […]
Thresholds
Friday, February 19th, 2021 Art Column,Thresholds is the very model of an underground art exhibition. Between 2016-19 Julia Davis and Lisa Jones explored the subterranean spaces near St. James Station, taking photographs, shooting video and making unconventional large-scale drawings. The results of their investigations are displayed at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University. There’s an intrinsic fascination in such a […]
NGV Triennial 2020
Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 Art Column,It’s an old adage that success breeds success but it’s just as true that success breeds complaints. In recent years no Australian art institution has come within coo-ee of the National Gallery of Victoria when it comes to organising spectacular, ambitious exhibitions. These shows have been intended to draw the biggest possible audiences and in […]
2020: The Year in Review
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021 Blog,In March last year a friend in Bangladesh forwarded a news item that said Australia’s borders would be closed until September. “Is it true!!!!” he exclaimed. I was sceptical and replied that neither the economy nor people’s limits of endurance would allow the closures to last that long. I thought we’d be flying again within […]
Wendy Sharpe: Ghosts
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021 Art Column,When a gallery offers virtually its entire exhibition space for an artist to do whatever she likes it’s both tempting and intimidating. Nothing, however, is too much for Wendy Sharpe. Ever since she took on the challenge of creating eight mural-sized works for the Cook & Philip Park Acquatic Centre in 1997, Sharpe has never […]
Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
Friday, January 15th, 2021 Blog,In The Ghost of Wombeyan Alex Seton has created a life-sized marble figure that lies prone on a slab beneath a heavy shroud. Should we see it as a body, or merely the impression of a body preserved in solid marble? Either way, the piece has a strong funereal connotation. The ‘ghost’ is a childhood […]
Andrew Sullivan
Tuesday, January 12th, 2021 Art Column,All children seem to be mad about dinosaurs, many of us never outgrowing that fascination. Dinosaur exhibitions are among the best attended events at international museums, while there have been five films in the Jurassic Park franchise since 1990, with another in the pipeline. Anyone requiring a dinosaur hit over the holidays might consider a trip […]
Peter Kingston: First Light
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 Art Column,Before seeing Peter Kingston: First Light at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, I was reminded that the late Giles Auty once compared ‘Kingo’ to Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). Although I would hesitate to endorse most of Giles’s observations about art and life, he may have been onto something. Although the Frenchman commands a place in the pantheon of […]
Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2020
Tuesday, December 1st, 2020 Art Column,Most children draw instinctively as a way of understanding and taking control of the world. If the great majority of us stop drawing at a certain age it’s not because we have attained a level of mastery. On the contrary, at around 9 or 10, so psychologists tell us, we become self-critical, feeling we don’t […]
Karl Wiebke, Ebony Russell, Lea Ferris & Dave Teer
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020 Art Column,It’s almost impossible to imagine ‘pure’ abstraction in art but Karl Wiebke takes us to the brink. His Seven Paintings at Liverpool Street Gallery avoid all the usual associations we habitually attach to an abstract work, being not suggestive of landscapes, figures, or architectonic details such as doors or windows. So what do we see? […]