Author Archives: Artist Profile
Robert Klippel
James Gleeson’s expansive 1983 monograph on friend and sometimes-collaborator Robert Klippel opens with an except from the young artist’s journal on 23 October, 1945. The excerpt comprises a list of questions about the function and purpose of art, ending with one statement: “I want to build on a firm foundation – step by step I […]
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Fuckboy
Your name is everywhere scrawled / tagged / engraved / typewritten on street signs maps stone walls scrolls currency diaries of young boys who just had wet dreams about you […]
Nike Savvas
There was a day in the fourth grade that the first Apple II series computer arrived at our school. With hindsight, the functions were comical but as we sat dumbfounded at the speed with which it could add and subtract, a fundamental shift was underway in education—wooden counting rods were out and high school math […]
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Tagged ARC ONE Gallery, Nike Savvas
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Venice Biennale
The 59th Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious art exhibition, opened this past April with a year’s delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The biennale, which includes exhibitions in national pavilions and an all-important central exhibition, takes place across two main locations in Venice: the Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale, with additional national pavilions […]
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Tagged Venice Biennale
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Parlour Games
Plod plod park and bone Intone Drown deeply down Viscous waste uncouth veritable thunderstruck, tree top errr … Corduroy pine ads Oddments Ardent waistcoats Westerly wander veer and left stream tear dun kneecap down Argue act anon Amble Anticipate Aver avere avare avevo un’anima Bears bake in beer parks only/abrupt/petulant/paradise/dill pickle Carpe diem, no cleaner […]
Antonia Perricone-Mrljak
Physical labour – especially the stubborn and repetitious kinds, like digging, planting, and painting – has a way of impressing itself down into the musculature of those who live through it. Perhaps this is even more the case with those who “make a living” through it, and who depend on it, in both literal and more […]
Jo Bertini
The American Southwest, as it exists within the white settler-colonist imagination, is loaded with complex and often contradictory narratives. Its low population density, heat, presumed barrenness, and sheer expanse belie the reality of complex ecologies, topographies, weather systems, and flourishing ancient and modern cultures. Jo Bertini has been courting these contradictions for several decades now, […]
Vicki Stavrou
Vicki Stavrou’s new body of work is sleek and sly. It both remembers and re-casts domestic life in mid-century modern style, conjuring a rich and sometimes troubled tapestry of art and design histories before the viewer. Sometimes, these tapestries are actually delivered as tapestries on Stavrou’s canvases, but the work nevertheless remains grounded in the painting […]
Michael Vale
Michael Vale’s paintings contain a melange of art historical references and symbols, from pipe-smoking dogs and skeletons, to surreal landscapes.
William Yang
Seeing and Being Seen, William Yang’s latest project, has had a long gestation. It was first proposed by former Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator Aaron Seeto four years ago, before being picked up by another QAGOMA curator, José Da Silva, who similarly moved on before the project was realised. “It […]
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Tagged Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, william yang
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Thancoupie
Uniquely gifted, she essentially invented her own Indigenous version of expressing culture through an entirely new artform – an art that broke long-established rules of making, glazing, function, and balance, and took the medium beyond the boundaries of ceramic vessels as defined throughout centuries of ceramic traditions in Europe and Asia. After face-to-face exposure to […]
Stolon Press: Publishing as a Collective Practice
Stolon Press is a small art press established in 2019 by Tom Melick and Simryn Gill. Melick is a writer, and Gill is best known as an artist – although both work in the fertile space between image and text. A stolon is a figure for just such an in-between space. It describes a stem […]
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Tagged Rosa Press, Stolon Press
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Mai Nguyễn-Long
Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father and an Australian mother, Mai Nguyen-Long grew up in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines; as an adult, she has lived in Australia, China, and Vietnam, through critical historical periods such as wartime, the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communism and the growing economy of […]
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Tagged Art Atrium, Berline Biennale, Wollongong Art Gallery
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Al Poulet
How do you picture your childhood? A lot of freedom. I was allowed to do what I wanted most of the time. Plenty of painting in dad’s studio and bike riding through Marrickville. It was a happy time with my brothers and sister. I was always playing. When did you come to Roy Jackson’s studio […]
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Tagged Al Poulet, Cummings & Poulet, Elisabeth Cummings, Linton and Kay Galleries, Penrith Regional Gallery
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Fifty Years of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation
The Sir William Dobell Art Foundation was established a year after the artist’s death in 1970, from a bequest with a deceptively simple, yet open-ended statement of purpose: to work “for the the benefit and promotion of art in NSW.” Quite what this “benefit and promotion” has entailed has, of course, varied over the foundation’s […]
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George Gittoes: 6/10/22 – The New Yellow House
In 1972, Jane Fonda was the hottest actress in Hollywood since Marilyn Monroe until she was photographed posing on an anti-aircraft gun in Vietnam. Despite being the star of Cat Ballou, Barefoot in the Park, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Barbarella, and winning an Academy Award for Klute she was blacklisted by Hollywood for the […]
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Tagged George Gittoes, Hellen Rose, Yellow House Jalalabad
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Georgia Spain
Pinned to Georgia Spain’s studio wall is a cluster of postcards, photographs and magazine clippings. There are images of dancers, a game of tug of war, a hot-dog eating contestant hunched over a mound of food, tables laid out with feasts, a group of cheese-rolling competitors throwing themselves down a hill with their limbs outstretched […]
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Tagged Georgia Spain, Tolarno Galleries
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Peter Kingston
There are ‘isms’, movements and ‘schools-of’ in the artistic vocabulary that, over time and with compelling evidence, end up sticking like glue…
Jasmine Togo-Brisby
The nineteenth century practice of “blackbirding,” as it has euphemistically become known, consisted of the widespread removal – through both coercion and force – of Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, to provide labour for the newly-established sugar plantations in Queensland. Between 1847 and 1904 this practice led to the displacement and enslavement of roughly 62,000 […]
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Tagged Jasmine Togo-Brisby, The Dowse Art Museum
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Audrey Newton
Audrey Newton delves into the subconscious. Her creative process, she tells me, often begins with “extracting ideas from altered states, such as dreams, meditation, or any trance-like state, and giving them a physical form.” This may be as an installation or as creative writing; she works across both practices. A pivotal moment occurred while on […]
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Tagged 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Audrey Newton, Durden and Ray, Our Neon Foe, SCA Gallery
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Gina Kalabishis
The term “biophilia” was first coined by psychologist Erich Fromm in 1964 to describe “a passionate love of life and all that is alive.” Human beings have a profound drive to connect with the natural world which seems ingrained in our DNA to survive as a species. While most people recognise that being in nature […]
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Tagged Gina Kalabishis, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery
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Natalya Hughes
Natalya Hughes’s The Interior, now exhibiting at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, invites visitors into the weird half-public, very-private space of the analyst’s office. Here, we inhabit that zone of play between repression and revelation, or perhaps between suppression and “the surface” – with all the decorative connotations that the latter term carries. Her office […]
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Tagged IMA, Institute of Modern Art, Sullivan+Strumpf
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Cressida Campbell
Plastered across the press release for this survey show is a quote: “Every artist has their language – any half-decent artist has their particular handwriting, as Margaret Olley used to say – and it’s showing people how to see your vision of the world.” This sentiment, of vocabulary and vision, is true for all artists […]
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Tagged Cressida Campbell, National Gallery of Australia, Philip Bacon Galleries
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Daniel Boyd
Professionally, the previous two COVID-19-addled years have been kind to Daniel Boyd. He is on the cusp of having his first solo survey show in a major Australian state gallery – at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), opening 4 June. He has worked on various projects with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director […]
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Tagged Art Gallery of New South Wales, Daniel Boyd, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
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