Tag: contemporary art
Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects
Thursday, September 26th, 2019 Art Column,Scientists have disproved the old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice, and John Kaldor has confirmed their findings. In 2009 the Art Gallery of NSW hosted the exhibition 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects. Today the AGNSW’s major exhibition is Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. The story […]
Savanhdary Vongpoothorn: All That Arises
Thursday, September 19th, 2019 Art Column,How dreary Australian culture would be if it wasn’t for refugees. In every generation since the Second World War there have been significant artists who came to this country because of conflict or persecution in their homelands. This is worth remembering at a time in which xenophobia and insularity are making a comeback, aided by […]
Sydney Contemporary Art Fair 2019
Thursday, September 12th, 2019 Art Column,Ask any art dealer and they’ll tell you the market has gone flat, as collectors brace themselves for a Trump-led recession. Ordinarily this should put a cloud over an event such as the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, now in its sixth iteration, but the atmosphere and sentiment is absurdly up-beat. When I visited Carriageworks last […]
Nusra Latif Qureshi & Adam Chang
Thursday, September 5th, 2019 Art Column,Before moving to Melbourne in 2001 at the age of 27, Nusra Latif Quereshi was trained as musaviripainter in her birthplace, Lahore. The term refers to a type of Islamic and Indian miniature painting that requires a high degree of skill and patience. Before moving to Australia in 1997, aged 37, Adam Chang studied painting […]
Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story
Wednesday, August 28th, 2019 Art Column,It’s a sign of the times when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one of the standard bearers for modern art, hosts an exhibition exposing the brutality of the city’s police force. In the age of Trump the United States has become a radically divided nation where issues such as refugees, racism and […]
Barbara McKay & Hadyn Wilson
Friday, August 9th, 2019 Art Column,In May the National Gallery of Australia launched a campaign called Know My Name, which aims to raise awareness of the work of Australian women artists. Call me a cynic, but when a leading institution takes up the cause of a supposedly neglected minority, one may assume the battle is already over. Historically-speaking there’s no […]
Danie Mellor
Saturday, August 3rd, 2019 Blog,NATSIAA may not be the most mellifluous of acronyms but it generates an incredible amount of excitement, as finalist Danie Mellor can attest. In 2009 Mellor won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, which is held every year at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, in Darwin. It’s good […]
Charlie Sheard: Absolute Abstraction
Saturday, August 3rd, 2019 Art Column,Absolute Abstraction is an uncompromising title for an uncompromising show at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum. So far removed is this event from the laidback norms of Australian painting that it would surely read better in German: Absolute Abstraktion. That hard ‘k’ makes all the difference. Charlie Sheard (b.1960) always knew he wanted to be […]
Shaun Gladwell: Pacific Undertow
Friday, July 26th, 2019 Art Column,We all have our blind spots and Shaun Gladwell (b.1972) is one of mine. For almost two decades I’ve watched people getting excited about his slow-motion videos of a figure on a skateboard, on a BMX bike, on a motorbike, on a surfboard, on a train… As someone who has never had the slightest desire […]
Tracey Moffatt & Kartika Kain
Thursday, July 18th, 2019 Art Column,On a rare week when I was able to get back to the commercial galleries there were a few tempting propositions. Chief among them, Peter Godwin’s Mask, Music and Studio at Defiance at Mary Place (until 25 July) – a really tough collection of still lifes that push the boundaries of the genre, picking up […]