Tag: landscape
Hadley’s Art Prize 2024
Saturday, August 10th, 2024 Art Column,This year Hadley’s Orient Hotel in Hobart is celebrating its 190th anniversary. An icon of Tasmania’s colonial era, this veteran will never be competing with the more glamorous, expensive establishments that are springing up around town, but it has history on its side. Stay at Hadley’s and you’ll find a plate with a picture of […]
Six Ways of Looking at Newhaven
Friday, July 26th, 2024 Art Column,Seven years ago, I spent a few days in Newhaven, a property on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, owned and administered by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). Last week I returned, in company with a group of artists who had seven days to make sketches and observations in preparation for an exhibition in […]
Salon des Refusés 2024
Sunday, June 30th, 2024 Art Column,This year, it’s the proud boast of the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, that “for the first time there are more works by Aboriginal artists than non-Aboriginal artists.” Surely it’s entirely inappropriate to celebrate a preponderance of one group over another when it’s the artists’ work, not their ethnicity that is being […]
Cutting Through Time: Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston and the Japanese Print
Sunday, June 2nd, 2024 Art Column,Cutting Through Time is an artful title for an innovative exhibition at the Geelong Art Gallery that explores affinities between Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston, and the great Japanese printmakers of the Ukiyo-e school. It’s yet another instance in which a Victorian gallery is surveying the work of artists firmly associated with Sydney. At the opening, […]
John R. Walker: Journeys and Return
Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 Art Column,“Inspiration” is a word we use in the most casual fashion, but it originally meant being under the direct influence of God. For the artist, John R. Walker, it has retained that significance. As a practising Christian, Walker believes there are paintings that are divinely inspired, the breath of God having touched something in the […]
Zoe Leonard: Al río/To the River
Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 Art Column,Zoe Leonard’s Al río/To the River is an exhibition that will test local audiences. It’s a deeply serious, critically acclaimed project featuring many hundreds of black-and-white images, that took five years to complete. The show is accompanied by a two-volume Hatje Cantz publication, with parallel texts in English, Spanish and French, in which the artist […]
Elisabeth Cummings: Radiance
Sunday, September 17th, 2023 Art Column,It’s the supreme test of a great artist that their work never grows stale. Upon repeated viewings, conducted over years or even decades, there are paintings that retain their freshness, renewing themselves in front of one’s eyes. As it has been only six years since a survey of Elisabeth Cummings’s work at the S.H. Ervin […]
John Olsen, ‘Lake Alexandrina and Dirt Roads’ (1997-98)
Friday, June 16th, 2023 Journals,JOHN OLSEN Lake Alexandrina and Dirt Roads 1997-98 oil on canvas 199.0 x 183.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John/ Olsen/ 97-98 signed and inscribed verso: Dirt Roads & Lake John/ Olsen Provenance: Savill Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne Exhibited: John Olsen: Recent Work 1995-1998, Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney, 7-25 April 1998, cat.13 (illus. […]
The Wynne Prize 2023
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023 Art Column,Although the Wynne Prize for landscape (and very occasionally, figurative sculpture) is twenty years older than the Archibald Prize, the portrait show gets all the headlines. It seems local audiences agree with Clement Greenberg, the champion of late modern Abstraction, who said landscape was “overrated”. Not being an Aussie, he did not proceed to transfer […]
Julia Gutman is the Winner
Friday, May 5th, 2023 Blog,This year’s Archibald Prize is a victory for youth. A 29-year-old artist has painted – or rather stitched – a portrait of a 27-year-old pop star. It’s not the worst work in the show, but I wouldn’t have called it as the best. My first impression of this year’s selection was that it was exceptionally […]