Tag: contemporary art
Singapore Biennale 2019
Thursday, December 12th, 2019 Art Column,Irony is not a concept one associates with Singapore but when the theme of the Biennale is: “Every step in the right direction” it implies a sense of conformity that would have delighted Lee Kuan Yew. Needless to say this is entirely contrary to what Artistic Director, Patrick Flores, had in mind. The subtitle is […]
Newsletter 314
Monday, November 25th, 2019 Newsletter,Sydney felt a bit like Beijing last week with grey smoke from the bushfires hanging in the air. The difference, so I’m told, is that the air quality in Beijing is a lot better nowadays as the government have quietly but prudently responded to growing public unrest. It takes a lot to rouse the Chinese […]
Japan Supernatural
Friday, November 22nd, 2019 Art Column,Directors’ forewords in exhibition catalogues are usually perfunctory affairs but there was one line in Michael Brand’s comments in the Japan Supernatural volume that caught my eye. It was surprising to find the Art Gallery of NSW director thanking Louise Neri of Gagosian Gallery, New York, for accompanying him on a first visit to Takashi Murakami’s […]
Cornelia Parker
Friday, November 15th, 2019 Art Column,A good deal of contemporary art is wilfully opaque but the work of Cornelia Parker is distinguished by a consistent, lucid intelligence – which is not to say there aren’t plenty of puzzles. I’ve never been a fan of wall labels that explain a work but with the survey Rachel Kent has put together for […]
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 […]
Steirischer Herbst 2019: Grand Hotel Abyss
Thursday, October 10th, 2019 Art Column,Welcome to the Grand Hotel Abyss. The phrase was coined in 1933 by Marxist literary critic, György Lukacs, as a put-down of another group of Marxist intellectuals – the so-called Frankfurt School, whose ranks included luminaries such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Lukacs argued that the Frankfurt School practised a form of […]
Alicia King – Linden New Art, Melbourne
Thursday, October 10th, 2019 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Alicia King Lives: Kensington, Melbourne. Age: 38 Represented by: Linden New Art (no Sydney representation) Her thing: Post-human sculptural works incorporating a range of industrial and organic materials. Our take. Alicia King has titled her exhibition at Linden New Art, Our Long Conversation with the Sun. If this sounds like a science fiction novel […]
Newsletter 307
Monday, October 7th, 2019 Newsletter,From the ‘Wet Tropics’ of Far North Queensland my travels have brought me to Klagenfurt, Austria, where I just saw a forest planted in a football stadium. The ambitious installation, For Forest, was dreamt up by Swiss curator, Klaus Littmann, who took years to organise and fund the project. The idea sprang from a 1970/71 […]
River on the Brink
Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 Art Column,When your Prime-Minister is admiring a McDonalds in Ohio while other world leaders are attending a United Nations summit on climate change, it gives a pretty clear indication of the importance this government assigns to environmental policy. The PM likes to present himself as a real Aussie bloke and his solution to global warming could […]