Tag: S.H. Ervin Gallery
Salon des Refusés 2014
Saturday, August 9th, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,So much has already been written about Sydney’s $9.3 million public sculpture proposals that I’m in two minds whether to comment or leave it alone. Nevertheless, it’s an issue that won’t go away. It’s depressing that the very idea of a city council spending money on art brings out the philistine in a large proportion […]
Arthur Boyd: An Active Witness
Saturday, June 28th, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Arthur Boyd (1920-99) was one of Australian art’s leading painters and one of its greatest mysteries. In the preface to her comprehensive biography, published in 2007, Darleen Bungey quotes Boyd’s youngest daughter, Polly, who calls her father “an enigma, probably one of the most secret people on earth.” This also acts as a disclaimer for […]
Bill Brown
Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Many years ago, when I was still a baby art critic, I remember Bill Brown at a party bawling drunkenly that he was the best painter in Australia. Having never seen his work I was in no position to argue. Shortly afterwards, Brown had a solo exhibition at the old Macquarie Galleries. If he was […]
Utzon’s Opera House
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“It has made me feel glad I am alive in Australia today,” wrote Patrick White in 1965, after a tour of the Sydney Opera House with architect, Jorn Utzon. “At last we are going to have something worth having.” The official opening in 1973 was overshadowed by the long and painful building process, which began […]
Windows to the Sacred
Saturday, September 14th, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” was the personal motto of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) once known to the headline writers as “the Great Beast” and “The Wickedest Man Alive.” It was a philosophy that would endear him to the counter-culture of the sixties and make him a hero for rock […]
Salon de Refusés 2013 & Jenny Sages
Saturday, April 20th, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,This year’s Archibald Prize was one of the most even contests in decades, but also one of the least memorable. There have been pictures in previous competitions that would have romped home in this year’s field, but the luck and timing was with Del Kathryn Barton, not with the ghosts of Archibalds past. If there […]
Angus Nivison: A Survey
Saturday, January 12th, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,For those of us who spend their lives going in and out of art galleries there’s nothing better than being surprised. Before entering Angus Nivison’s survey at the S.H. Ervin Gallery I felt entirely familiar with this artist’s work. I’d even written a preface for the catalogue when the exhibition debuted at the Tamworth Regional […]
David Boyd
Saturday, September 8th, 2012 Art Essays, Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,If one had to nominate a director to make a movie about the Boyd family, it would be hard to go past Wes Anderson. After watching his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, I imagined what he might do with the eccentric childhood of David Boyd and his siblings at their Murrumbeena property, Open Country. One painting […]
Salon des Refusés
Saturday, April 28th, 2012 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,In the brochure that accompanies this year’s Salon des Refusés at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, one reads that the show is “in the tradition of the renegade French Impressionists of the 1860s, who held a breakaway exhibition from the reactionary French Academy.” Leaving aside the fact that the term ‘Impressionism’ wasn’t used until the 1870s, this […]
Russell Drysdale: The Drawings
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 Art Essays, Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,When Lou Klepac tells us that Russell Drysdale “was always reluctant to get on with painting or even drawing,” it is the merest understatement. Of all the Australian artists who have made a lasting contribution to the national culture, Drysdale was the least driven by either ambition or compulsion. This year is the hundredth anniversary […]