Tag: Museum of Contemporary Art
The National 4: New Australian Art
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Surveys of contemporary art are rarely smooth, coherent affairs and The National 4: Australian Art Now is no exception. In her catalogue essay, Jennifer Higgie tries to answer the unanswerable question: “What is Australian contemporary art?” and comes up with a long list of contradictory propositions. It’s not exactly revelatory, but it makes the point […]
23rd Sydney Biennale: A Brief Guide
Tuesday, March 15th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Preparations for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney were well underway before somebody noticed this year’s theme – rīvus – was an anagram of “virus”. For director, José Roca, who has worked to assemble a vast international show in a locked-down world, it would have been impossible to ignore the pandemic. Roca is from Columbia but […]
Where to now for the MCA?
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A change is always an opportunity, and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is set to begin a new chapter with the departure of longterm director, Elizabeth-Ann Macgregor and senior curator, Rachel Kent. Yet the transition has been complicated by two years of pandemic, and the impending opening of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Sydney Modern […]
Doug Aitken: New Era
Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Doug Aitken, born and based in California, is one of the most globalised of all contemporary artists. He once told an intervewer that “home can be motion” and his work sets out to prove that proposition. His projects are often conceived on a grand scale, requiring teams of collaborators. He makes video, photography, sculpture, performance, […]
The National 2021
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald 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 […]
Fare thee well, Liz Ann
Saturday, March 6th, 2021 Blog,Retiring after 22 years at the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Liz Ann Macgregor still inspires mixed feelings. She arrived in 1999 in a burst of Scottish exotica, a veritable blur of tartan, and says she is now returning from whence she came. Possibly Macgregor’s most notable achievement was to steer the institution […]
Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Lindy Lee grew up in Brisbane in the 1960s, the daughter of Chinese parents who left Guandong when the Communists came to power. She is ethnically Chinese but Australian born and bred, a duality that has coloured her entire life. She remembers being the only Chinese face in her classes at school, which meant she […]
Biennale of Sydney 2020. Part 2
Thursday, March 26th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Another week, another avalanche of statistics about infections and fatalities. As I write, the Biennale of Sydney, which has made heroic efforts to remain open, has just announced it will be switching to a digital platform. This is a poor substitute for the first-hand experience of works of art but it’s better than a total […]
Cornelia Parker
Friday, November 15th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald 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 Sydney Morning Herald 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 […]