Author Archives: Artist Profile
REVIEW: Dangerously Modern | Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940
The two-and-a half-kilogram catalogue for the Dangerously Modern exhibition, set inside its pink, gossamer carry bag, is the perfect metaphor for this exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) featuring fifty Australian women artists who left for Europe to travel and study art in the heady years of modernism, from 1890 to 1940. […]
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Tagged Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of NSW, Dangerously Modern, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Janet Cumbrae Stewart, Susan Charlton
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PREVIEW: Salvatore Zofrea | Seven Days of Summer
As an Italian immigrant, who came to Australia as a young boy, Zofrea’s understanding and connection with the Australian landscape has been a lifelong journey. His paintings, drawings and prints chart the artist’s time spent in the bush between his home and studio in the Blue Mountains, and his studio in Seaforth, Sydney. Known for […]
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Tagged Australian Galleries, Lucy Stranger, Salvatore Zofrea
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TRIBUTE: Heroically Beautiful, Bruce Goold (1948-2025)
For a short time in the early seventies, boring old Sydney Town had a place to go that fitted Bruce’s vision. After living and successfully exhibiting in London and Dublin, Bruce moved to Palm Beach in 1990 with his wife Kate and young daughter Nancy. Nancy describes him as being like a lyrebird, “Dad was […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged Bruce Goold, George Gittoes, The yellow House
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REVIEW: A Meditation on Impermanence
The Wama Foundation has nurtured significant momentum for its ambitious NCEA project over the past decade. In 2015 the foundation engaged Jan van Schaik, co-founder of MvS Architects, to lead the NCEA design process. In 2021 the Wama Arts Council initiated a biennial national award and acquisition prize for works on paper, the Wama Art […]
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Tagged Inga Walton, Jacobus Capone, NCEA, Wama
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PROFILE: Mason Kimber | The Skin of the Painting
At his Leichhardt studio, Mason Kimber shows me a cache of photographs taken of a Perth nightclub, owned by Kimber’s father, in the 1980s and 1990s. The club had many names and many looks—including a Bat Cave and a Shark Bar—all designed from his father’s outsized imagination. Kimber remembers being taken to the club by […]
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Tagged haptic visuality, Mason Kimber, UNSW Galleries
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REVIEW: Sam Contis: Moving Landscape
Through a complex and nuanced investigation of movement and time, the photographic work of U.S. still-and-moving image artist Sam Contis, seductively unfolds across distinct landscapes. These populated terrains, as fragments, offer portals into worlds as different kinds of relationships to land, imbued with purpose and an experience of place. The images unpack the role that […]
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Tagged AGWA, Laetitia Wilson, photography, Sam Contis, The Art Gallery of Western Australia
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Cinderella Man, Archie Moore (Bigambul-Kamilaroi)
The year 2024 is a special year as Australia somewhat confidently readies for the approaching Olympic Games in Paris. The national society feels it has a proud sporting record, if lacking in balance of achievements in intellectual, cultural, and moral terms. A form of cultural cringe perhaps. Lieutenant Cook didn’t discover our continent but did […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged Archie Moore, Djon Mundine, kith and kin
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INTERVIEW: Royston Harpur, A Painter’s Painter
You studied with the Polish born painter, Professor Maximilian Feuerring from 1956 to 1959. Was that at an art school? I was eighteen and I saw Feuerring’s advertisement for private art classes in the local newspaper, so no it wasn’t an art school. He had been a professor at the Universitas International in Munich (1947 […]
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Tagged H.R. Hyatt-Johnstin, Mudgee, Mudgee Arts Precinct, Royston Harpur
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REVIEW: Yolngu Power, the art of Yirrkala
Presenting an eighty-year art history of sixteen east Arnhem Land Yolngu clans represented by the Yirrkala Art Centre Buku Larrnggay Mulka, it recalls the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Crossing Country that some twenty years ago traced a nearly 100-year history of west Arnhem Land art. This historical format pushes against the usual focus […]
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Tagged Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of NSW, ARTIST PROFILE, Ian McLean, indigenous art, Weekend Review, Yirrkala, Yolngu Power
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REVIEW: French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Divided into ten thematic sections, the curatorial brief (according to the NGV’s online publicity) is to place “emphasis on the thoughts and observations of the artists themselves.” And, to this effect, texts proliferate but do not dominate. But French Impressionism does not need to take recourse to artists’ intentions. The works, dare I say it, […]
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Tagged Alan Krell, French Impressionism, NGV
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REVIEW: Classics from the Golden Age of Utopia
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Gloria Tamerre Petyarre and Ada Bird Petyarre lead with major paintings that were revolutionary at the time. They are supported by many of their friends and peers who add to the richness and diversity of the wider Utopia community. There are major works in this exhibition including those drawn from private […]
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Tagged Christopher Hodges, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Utopia Art Sydney
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Hossein Valamanesh: Poetic Objects
A stone I died and rose again; A plant I died and rose an animal; I died an animal and was born a man. Why should I fear? What have I lost by death? Rumi (1207-1273) For Hossein Valamanesh, the writings of Rumi and other Persian poets from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries were […]
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Tagged Annette Larkin, Poetic Objects, Valamanesh
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State of the Art (Fair)
OLSEN Gallery is one of fifteen galleries presenting works in Photo Sydney, with selected works from George Byrne’s 2024 series Synthetica. In Byrne’s photography, things aren’t always what they appear to be. Landscapes become dreamscapes and the traditional bounds of photography are reimagined and reconstructed. Byrne digitally knits together scenes from his hometown of Los […]
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DISCOVERY: Bronte Cormican-Jones
Cormican-Jones is often away from home, the practical realities of her artmaking. After graduating in 2022 with first-class honours from Sydney College of the Arts, she has participated in many residencies both locally and internationally including at JamFactory, Tarndanya / Adelaide; Canberra Glassworks, Kamberri / Canberra; and the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State, USA. […]
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Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationgalerie
The Stülerbau West, the historical part of Museum Berggruen in Berlin, has been undergoing a substantial renovation since autumn 2022. A selection from the Berggruen collection has gone on international tour to Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Beijing, Venice, Paris and now Canberra. Later it will travel to Madrid. It is not unusual for an art collection […]
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Tagged Art, Cezanne, Klee, nga, Sasha Grishin
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A Difficult Artist
MIRRORSCAPE, by French artist Théo Mercier, is the first presentation of his work in Australia. MIRRORSCAPE is a sculpture delicately and masterly carved from tonnes of compressed Tasmanian sand into debris by four sculptors: Enguerrand David from Belgium, US based Sue McGrew, the Italian Leonardo Ugolini and Australian sculptor Kevin Crawford. The sculpture is installed […]
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Thirty years of Defiance
Campbell’s full-strength, unrestrained character exemplifies his artistic idioms when it comes down to doing serious art business. The naming of Defiance matches too, his ideological traits, as Campbell recently told me, “Anyone saying it can’t be done, you just watch.” Notable artist Ann Thomson, who shows with Defiance, tells me that the gallery has “always […]
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William Mackinnon
William Mackinnon has just flown into Melbourne from Spain, where he spends half his life. He is en route to Lorne on the Great Ocean Road where he has a large beachside house that allows him to indulge his twin passions for surfing and painting. He currently has one major exhibition in Madrid at […]
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Careful What You Wish For
Hi Desirée, Last Friday evening at the Intensive Care Café was a blast. So many up-and-coming artists together in one place at one time. Darting from topic to topic. The sting and itch of irritating ideas. There was a buzz about that pesky infestation of bugs you mentioned last week—the Grave-hoppers. Why do they hover […]
Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: old and new at Jilmara Arts UNSW Galleries
Within a mix of translucent paintings, etchings and lithographs, “The Queen of Jilamara” (as Kantilla was affectionately known), is accompanied by Taracarijimo Freda Warlapinni’s quivering marks including an exceptional bark in gritty red and yellow ochre. Both artists passed away in 2003 and held an esteemed place in the art centre at Milikapiti; through their […]
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Betty Kuntiwa Pumani: maḻatja-maḻatja (those who come after)
Driving into the imposing landscape of Bundanon’s arts precinct, visitors are immediately enveloped in the environment. Dramatic cliffs abound and a serpentine river that features so impactfully in the works of the benefactor of the site, artist Arthur Boyd, frame the landscape. In this world, visitors drift between the sublime natural view that embraces them, […]
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Chutzpah: Spirit. Recollection. Self.
Hebrew is not merely the language of the Jews. Jewish people trace their lineage to Abraham, the first Hebrew—Ivri—a word derived from traversing to the other side of a river. However, rather than a strictly oppositional phenomenology, Ivri is a perplexing and sacred non-positionality. It is the fluidity between homeland and here, wherever “here” may […]
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The Intelligence of Painting
How do these artists’ lone works fair at representing contemporary painting in Australia today? With this abridged exhibition it might be difficult to draw any substantial conclusions, but collection hangs often feature just a single painting or work by an artist to illustrate their contribution to a movement, style, or school of art. With a […]
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Why? —after Bob Flanagan and Sophie Cassar
Because a theatre is nothing without an audience. Because fasting before an operation is a form of compulsory savings. Because of polyester surgical sutures. Because it costs a lot of money to be sick and you cannot afford the alternative. Because of mountainous landscapes. Because during the time it takes for Orlan to express that […]
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