Tag: contemporary art
The Square
Friday, March 9th, 2018 Film Reviews,As another Sydney Biennale looms one wonders why there aren’t more satires on contemporary art. The reason perhaps, is that reality routinely exceeds the wildest imaginings of the satirist. The beauty of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last year, lies in its understatement. It presents one bizarre scenario after […]
Perth Arts Festival 2018
Friday, March 2nd, 2018 Art Column,When it comes to rampant development Perth loses nothing in comparison with its eastern counterparts. Amid the new buildings and public works only one thing remains the same: the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which looks just as shabby year after year. Its every mention provokes Olympic-standard eye-rolling in other members of the local arts […]
Chinese New Year Lunar Lanterns & In Your Dreams
Friday, February 23rd, 2018 Art Column,Bread and circuses was the classical world’s formula for keeping the population happy. The famous phrase originates in Juvenal’s 10th Satire, when the poet laments that Romans have become so blasé about the political process they are happy to sell their votes for grain handouts and lavish public entertainments. With the NSW Government proposing to […]
Dhaka Art Summit 2018
Saturday, February 10th, 2018 Art Column,Bangladesh is not the first place that springs to mind when asked about fashionable art destinations. Yet if you wanted to visit to a single city in the world last week where you might meet the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the director of Britain’s Tate art museums, and a top-line […]
Katharina Grosse
Friday, February 2nd, 2018 Art Column,There’s a certain Guinness-Book-of-Records quality about Katharina Grosse’s installation at Carriageworks. On opening night everyone kept asking: “Is this the biggest painting in the world? Is this the biggest painting ever made in Australia?”, and so on. My short answer was: “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen a bigger painting anywhere.” A quick Internet […]
Hyper Real
Thursday, January 25th, 2018 Art Column,Hyper Real at the National Gallery of Australia is one of those exhibitions that must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Realism may appear to be the most obvious approach to making art, but it has been the exception rather than the rule throughout different cultures and epochs. The Seated Scribe of […]
Kathryn Del Barton: The Highway is a Disco
Saturday, January 20th, 2018 Art Column,A friend in Melbourne thinks he’s found the key to the mysterious pictures of Del Kathryn Barton: Smarties. His theory goes that in the formative years of childhood Del had a desperate, unrequited desire for Smarties. As a result she has been compelled forever after to fill her paintings with these small, brightly coloured lollies. […]
Gareth Sansom: Transformer
Saturday, December 30th, 2017 Art Column,Invited to nominate a masterpiece for a Radio National interview, Gareth Sansom decided to talk about Ingmar Bergman’s movie, The Seventh Seal (1957), which he first saw when he was 18 years old. Decades later he was still thinking about the film, making it the subject of large-scale paintings in 2007 and 2013. The Grim […]
NGV Triennial 2017
Saturday, December 23rd, 2017 Art Column,Melbourne has long been envious of the Sydney Biennale, which has just announced the artist list for its 21st iteration in 2018. At the opening of the inaugural NGV Triennial this week there was much talk of the one-and-only Melbourne International Biennial, held in 1999, under a title that in retrospect sounds a little tragic: […]
Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow
Friday, December 15th, 2017 Art Column,Yayoi Kusama has been the most hyperproductive of artists, but old age seems to have inspired even more prodigious feats. At 88-years-old her annual output of retrospectives, surveys, commercial exhibitions, public art projects and self-penned publications is mind-boggling. Most artists would feel pleased if they achieved as much during an entire lifetime. It helps, of […]