Tag: contemporary art
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 […]
Michael Armitage
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Michael Armitage is one of today’s most acclaimed young English artists, the only problem is that he’s Kenyan. Born in Nairobi in 1984, Armitage attended boarding school in England, and went on to have an impeccable English art education at the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy. Yet as so often happens, the […]
Art and Money Revisited
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,When Robert Hughes delivered his jeremaiad, Art and Money, in 1984, it seemed as if the earth would surely open up and swallow the greedy dealers, the opportunistic artists, the vulgar, nouveau riche collectors who had wrought such pestilence upon the fair face of Art. The gist of Hughes’s argument was that art was being […]
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, […]
Ramsay Art Prize 2021
Tuesday, June 1st, 2021 Art Column,Still basking in the success of its Clarice Beckett survey the Art Gallery of South Australia is now pushing hard in the field of contemporary art. The Beckett exhibition was a major feat of historical restitution but the 2021 Ramsay Art Prize is focused on the future. The $100,000 first prize is awarded not simply […]
White Rabbit: Lumen
Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 Art Column,Lumens may sound like alien beings from a science fiction novel but they are units of measurement for “the total quantity of visible light emitted by a source per unit of time.” Any light source may be measured in this way but lumens are usually spoken about in relation to projectors. By titling its current […]
Home Of The Arts Opens
Tuesday, May 18th, 2021 Art Column,It’s been a long time coming but last weekend the Gold Coast finally opened its new gallery, modestly titled Home Of The Arts. A few minutes drive from the concrete heart of Surfers Paradise it’s virtually impossible to miss the building – the latest concoction by Melbourne postmodernists, Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM). A six-storey block […]
The National 2021
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 Art Column,Conceived as “a celebration of contemporary Australian art”, The National has been a strange beast ever since its inception in 2017. One of the problems of this event – a biennial collaboration between the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carriageworks – is that it has occasionally seemed to be a […]
Bill Henson
Saturday, March 13th, 2021 Art Column,A new exhibition by Bill Henson is always an event – an eruption of the extraordinary into the fabric of everyday life. That hyper-productive philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, suggests that for most people the fundamental earth-shattering event is falling in love. Why would we describe this process as a “fall” if it wasn’t in some way […]
Five Artists, Seven days
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 Art Column,It seems like an age ago but in September 2019 I travelled with five artists and a film crew to Mount Zero Taravale in far north Queensland, a property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). We spent a week in the bush preparing for an exhibition that has just opened at Defiance Gallery, Mary […]