Tag: photography
Zoe Leonard: Al río/To the River
Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald 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 […]
White Rabbit: I Am the People
Saturday, August 12th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In China, art is constantly flirting with politics. It’s a game of approach-and-retreat everywhere in evidence in the new White Rabbit exhibition, I Am the People, which features 27 artists or groups of artists. It’s one of curator, David Williams’s most ambitious, most overtly political shows – perhaps not as attractive or spectacular as some […]
Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Andy Warhol died in 1987 at the age of 58. Had he managed the standard three score and ten, he would have found himself in a world rapidly becoming addicted to the mobile phone and the Internet. One thinks, irresistibly, of ducks and water. Julie Robinson, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Curator of Prints, […]
White Rabbit: I Loved You
Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Anybody who has seen the Marriage Market in Shanghai’s People Park will never imagine the Chinese as a nation of desperate romantics. Every weekend the Market is swarming with parents eager secure an advantageous match for their son or daughter. One gets the impression that marriage is primarily an economic transaction, with love being a […]
Shakespeare to Winehouse
Saturday, May 14th, 2022 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Shakespeare to Winehouse may not be the most important show ever held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, but I can’t think of a bigger one. The most surprising thing about this collection of more than 80 works, drawn from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, is how long it has taken […]
William Yang: Seeing & Being Seen
Monday, April 5th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,William Yang is a Sydney institution but a Queenslander born and bred. Last week he was reclaimed by his state of origin for a retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery that allows us to read one artist’s career as a tale of social evolution. Even allowing for the wrong turnings of the present day, over […]
Bill Henson
Saturday, March 13th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald 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 […]
Thresholds
Friday, February 19th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Thresholds is the very model of an underground art exhibition. Between 2016-19 Julia Davis and Lisa Jones explored the subterranean spaces near St. James Station, taking photographs, shooting video and making unconventional large-scale drawings. The results of their investigations are displayed at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University. There’s an intrinsic fascination in such a […]
Michael Zavros, Gunybi Ganambarr, Li Jin
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Michael Zavros is a very 21st century artist. Known for a fastidious, hyperreal style of painting and a preoccupation with fashion and luxury goods, he would have been anathema in those days when the avant-garde strove to make art that was not a marketable commodity. Marketability is Zavros’s great and abiding theme, although he comes […]
Lisa Reihana – Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Lisa Reihana Lives: Freeman’s Bay, Auckland, New Zealand Age: 55 Represented by: Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert (No Melbourne representation) Her thing: Dramatic, editioned photos derived from a large-scale 3D immersive film. Our take. Lisa Reihana has been making theatrical, multi-media works on Pacific themes for decades, but after her large-scale video projection, in Pursuit of […]