Author Archives: Artist Profile
ESSAY: Judging art prizes in Australia
Australia’s addiction to art prizes is difficult to comprehend. To the best of my knowledge, Australia has more art prizes per head of population than any other country in the world. There are about seventy-five major art prizes and up to 900 smaller ones. Some may explain it as part of our national betting culture, […]
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Tagged 2022, 2022 winner of the Archibald Prize in 2022; Ksenija Hrnjak, 2022; Blak Douglas, 2022. Photographed by Art Gallery of New South Wales, Archibald, art prizes, Installation view, Moby Dickens, paintings from the left: Jeremy Eden, Red gloves of Tim Tszyu, Samuel Johnson OAM, Sulman Prize, The Archibald Prize, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, Wynne Prize
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BOOK REVIEW: John Berger and Me
The measure of how much I enjoyed this book is that as I was reading it I was also compiling my list of Top Ten Books of the 21st Century for ABC Radio National’s poll of its audience. I placed John Berger and Me, 2024, by Nikos Papastergiadis in second place behind Wittgenstein’s Poker, 2001, by David Edmonds and […]
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Tagged Artist Profile Issue 73, Greek migrant experience, John Berger, John Berger and Me, Nikos Papastergiadis, Peter Hill, Ways of Seeing
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REVIEW | J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde
Australian art history still holds many gaps. The life and work of John Joseph Wardell Power (1881–1943) is one of them. Curated by Ann Stephen, senior curator of art at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and her collaborator ADS Donaldson, J.W. Power: Art, War and the avant-garde seeks to redress that gap and place Power […]
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Tagged Artist Profile Issue 73, avant-garde, cubism, David Ellis, J.W Power, La Femme à l’ombrelle
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REVIEW | Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs
Mitch Cairns: Restless Legs was commissioned for the Contemporary Projects series at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, where it was first presented in early 2025. Cairns is no stranger to the AGNSW, having won the Archibald Prize in 2017 with a portrait of partner and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape, but Restless […]
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Tagged Judith Blackall, Mitch Cairns, Restless Legs, Wollongong Art Gallery
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REVIEW | Pulse: Christopher Hodges
Pulse, the title of his current exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney, alludes to the rhythmic equilibrium of parts that has long characterised his work. As a painter Hodges strives for simplicity and order, alternating between geometric and natural motifs; as a sculptor he realises a similar range of forms in solid materials that stand their […]
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Tagged Christopher Hodges, Joe Frost, Pulse, Utopia
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REVIEW: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 + Migrating Modernism: The Architecture of Harry Seidler
Visiting Venice in late June, once the champagne flutes have emptied and the holders of “professional” badges have flown home, offers a different kind of clarity. The pavilions are left to their truest audience—and the blistering heat. As a punishing wave of high temperatures settles over the lagoon, climate change shifts from conceptual backdrop to […]
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Tagged Architecture, Harry Seidler, Hili Perlson, Venice Architecture Biennale 2025
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REVIEW: A Tear in the Fabric
The curator Con Gerakaris’s considered arrangement of diverse works conjures the distinctive cultural and physical topographies of Asia. Entering A Tear in the Fabric, the viewer transits Leyla Stevens’s GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda), 2023, a single channel video work depicting the mythological demon queen Rangda, a staple of Kecak. This genre of traditional Balinese […]
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Tagged A Tear in the Fabric, Ali Tahayori, Amez Yavuz, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Khaled Sabsabi, Silversalt Photography, Tiyan Baker, Zico Albaiquni
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PROFILE: Anna Johnson in the Studio
Walking into Anna Johnson’s studio is like passing through a portal into another world: a flight of rickety wooden stairs leads to the top floor of a turn-of-last-century building where Johnson serves tea in ornate vintage china cups, a lapdog appears to have emerged straight from a late Rembrandt oil painting and the artist herself […]
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Tagged abstraction, Anna Johnson, AP70, Artist Profile 70, Color Field, Colour Field, colourist, Defiance Gallery, NERAM, New England Regional Art Museum, Susie Burge
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PROFILE: The Acts of Katy B. Plummer
After winning the Fishers Ghost Open Art Award last year for her epic video installation Margaret and the Grey Mare, 2023, opportunities across the theatre, opera and art world are opening for Katy B. Plummer. She has also begun a new major work that integrates these three spheres of practice, deconstructing and reconfiguring them with […]
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Tagged AP72, Artist Profile Issue 72, creative matrilineage, female identity, Katy B. Plummer; Lucy Stranger, theatrical video installation
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REVIEW | Zen and the Void: the spiritual quest of Royston Harpur
Co-curators and longtime friends Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Brad Buckley, and Noel Thurgate and Gallery Curator Lizzy Galloway, selected the Buddha from Harpur’s extensive collection of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist artefacts (hundreds of scrolls, paintings, sculptures, and writings) by way of homage to Harpur’s devotion to Ch’an Buddhist principles, both as a way of being and mode of […]
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Issue 72
EDITOR’S NOTE In a time when visual culture is saturated with content—both profound and disposable—Artist Profile is exploring one of the most foundational yet misunderstood aspects of art: judgement. Judgement in the visual arts isn’t just about critique or elitism. It’s about discernment—the ability to evaluate technique, context, intention and innovation across all its genres. […]
Issue 71
Editor’s Note The qualities that have empowered cover artist Janet Dawson to move back-and-forth from figurative to non-figurative works is closely observed in Sasha Grishin’s essay. Dawson studied at a time when students expected and respected art teachers to teach. Senior artists and art teachers today tell me they feel almost powerless to apply their […]
FILM REVIEW | Ghosts in a Cave: William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot
William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot opens with the artist pacing back and forth against the backdrop of his studio, with remnants of a sketch barely legible on the wall. The film cuts and the same image is projected on an open sketch book, with Kentridge rendered a phantom on the page. Two hands, Kentridge’s […]
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Tagged Aleks Wansbrough, MUBI, Self Portrait, Self Portrait as a Coffe-pot, Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, William Kentridge
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REVIEW | Walking Home: Road to Trachoni Kythreas
To commemorate fifty years since the invasion, Savvas travelled to Cyprus to video her walk from her mother’s home in Kaimakli, Nicosia, to her father’s home village in Trachoni Kythreas. For me, encountering this exhibition had an uncanny quality to it. Ten years ago, I made a very similar pilgrimage to the village of my […]
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REVIEW: Breaking the Silence | Our Story: Aboriginal-Chinese People in Australia
National museums serve as custodians of collective memory. They preserve, interpret, and present stories that shape a nation’s cultural identity. The National Museum of Australia (NMA) fulfills this role powerfully through Our Story: Aboriginal-Chinese People in Australia, on display in the museum’s Focus Gallery. Though modest in scale, this exhibition and accompanying publication reveals a […]
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Tagged artists of mixed descent, Chinese artists, Christian Thompson, Damien Shen, Gordon Hookey, Guangzhou Library, Jason Wing, Jenna Lee, Lansheng Zhang, Lloyd Gawura Hornsby, Michael Laing, Museum of Chinese Australian History Victoria, National Museum of Australia, Our Story, Our Story: Aboriginal-Chinese People in Australia, Vernon Ah Kee, Zhou Xiaoping
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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 […]
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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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