Tag: photography
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 […]
Koo Bohnchang
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“In matters of art,” wrote the erudite poet, Paul Valéry, “erudition is a sort of defeat.” The argument is that the freshness of first perceptions may be destroyed by specialised knowledge. Imagine, for example, an expert on ceramics standing in front of a great piece of pottery. There are questions about where and when the […]
Shadow catchers
Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In Adelbert von Chamisso’s gothic tale, Peter Schlemihl, the hero sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for a purse perpetually filled with gold, but all the wealth in the world is not enough to compensate for the horror he inspires when his lack of a shadow is noticed. For “shadow” we might read […]
David Goldblatt: Photography & Truth
Friday, August 9th, 2019 Blog,David Goldblatt will always be known as the photographer who exposed the evils of Apartheid to the world, but to characterise him as a ‘political’ artist is to diminish the breadth of his achievements. This is something Goldblatt has in common with all great photographers who have found their subjects in war, poverty, hatred and […]
Tracey Moffatt & Kartika Kain
Thursday, July 18th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,On a rare week when I was able to get back to the commercial galleries there were a few tempting propositions. Chief among them, Peter Godwin’s Mask, Music and Studio at Defiance at Mary Place (until 25 July) – a really tough collection of still lifes that push the boundaries of the genre, picking up […]
Dina Goldstein – Lyons Gallery, Sydney
Saturday, May 18th, 2019 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Dina Goldstein Lives: Vancouver, Canada Age: 49 Represented by:Lyons Gallery, Paddington, Sydney (Plus galleries in USA, Canada, UK, Italy, France and Portugal) Her thing.Humorous-but-serious, elaborately staged colour photographs on the theme of religion in a secular world. Our take.Every year Sydney’s Head-On Photo Festival gets bigger and more ambitious. Among a range of leading […]
David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018
Friday, November 23rd, 2018 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“I was never interested in making propaganda for anybody,” said David Goldblatt, “and didn’t allow my photos to be used that way.” It’s an important point because even Goldblatt’s admirers tend to see him as a political photographer who drew global attention to the injustices of Apartheid. As this landmark retrospective at the Museum of […]
Head On Photo Festival 2018
Friday, May 18th, 2018 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Head On is still not getting the attention it deserves. We make a big fuss about the Sydney Biennale, we go wild for Vivid, we swarm over the Sydney foreshores during Sculpture by the Sea, but after ten years the Head On Photo Festival survives on a fraction of the resources devoted to other events. […]
Chinese New Year Lunar Lanterns & In Your Dreams
Friday, February 23rd, 2018 Sydney Morning Herald 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 […]