Author Archives: Artist Profile
Peter Godwin
“Look, I hate opening up like this,” Peter Godwin says. “It’s not that I find it difficult, but it’s like Matisse said: ‘Painter’s tongues should be cut out at birth’.” I’m glad that Godwin still has his tongue. I’m glad because, while the artist may wish his work to speak for itself, Godwin also has […]
Peter Hill’s Top Ten Picks from Sydney Contemporary 2022
Peter Schjeldahl, the great American art critic for The Village Voice, and now The New Yorker, once described the visceral experience of viewing the astonishing late works of Willem de Kooning at the Metropolitan. “The effect was like a plane taking off, when the acceleration presses you against the seat. The painting’s violent intelligence detonated […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged ARC ONE Gallery, Bett Gallery, Carriageworks, Darren Knight Gallery, Egg & Dart, Fox Jensen Gallery, GAGPROJECTS, How Langsford, James Makin Gallery, MARS Gallery, Michael Bugelli Gallery, National Art School, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Contemporary, THIS IS NO FANTASY
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Michael Snape
Michael Snape is probably best known as a sculptor. But he is, in fact, an artistic polymath – a painter, a writer, and an assiduous blogger, writing articles, reviews, poetry, and opinion pieces. His new exhibition Here at Australian Galleries, Sydney in September focusses on painting supported by some, mainly domestic-scaled, sculptures. One might expect […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Australian Galleries, Australian Galleries Sydney
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Dani McKenzie
In 2017, Dani McKenzie’s work was imbued with a strange nostalgic melancholy. She was undertaking a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and her paintings, which were based on found photography, were infused with mystery as neither the artist or viewer could know the history or the context of the images. They […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Dani McKenzie, MARS Gallery, Olsen Gallery
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The Picasso Century
The National Gallery of Victoria’s Winter Masterpieces series has been running since 2004. When looking at the full list of these exhibitions, it is striking how few feature artists who had not already made their reputations by 1939. Thus far, the only two to do so amongst the total eighteen were Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Andrew Gaynor, Nation Gallery of Victoria, Picasso
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Mary Tonkin
One of Australia’s pre-eminent landscape artists, Mary Tonkin’s practice is centred around Kalorama, located on the outer-eastern fringe of Melbourne, adjacent to Mount Dandenong. Her grandfather established a farm there in the 1930s that still supplies rare bulbs and cut flowers. She knows the environs intimately, having made it her artistic focus for the last […]
Posted in Contents
Tagged Australian Galleries Melbourne, Sydney Contemporary
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George Gittoes: 12/9/22 – Borderlessness Peshawar
I left for Islamabad knowing I was “going out on a limb” – that it could “all be for nothing,” and I may have to return to Australia not having been able to enter Afghanistan if I could not obtain a visa. The Afghan Embassy in Canberra had ceased giving visas without explanation and we […]
Posted in Contents, Ukraine
Tagged Peshawar, Yellow House, Yellow House Jalalabad, Yellow Submarine to Taliwood
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Bush Wanderings
Of Anubis, jackals, dream, trample and stamp, looking for the amphibian that moves, through a glass darkly His armour shines, amid croaking sounds An attribution to the burrowing frogs The audience unaware that I in my studio, am aware of the soap opera of species, the teeming life force out there, neurotic nerves, out there […]
ZIDANE
I’m Zinedine Zidane Not the French professional footballer widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time I’m not the elite playmaker renowned for his elegance, vision, ball control and technique Nor am I the attacking midfielder who dominated for Cannes, Bordeaux, Juventus and Real Madrid I’m not the 21st century portrait who’s […]
Issue 59
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work. EDITOR’S NOTE By the time Artist Profile 59 goes on sale, Australia will either have the same Prime Minister or a new one. As I write this, the country is saturated with competing narratives of “political values,” […]
Posted in Back Issues
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Jacqueline Balassa
The scenes in Balassa’s exhibition Waterfalls and Carol’s Garden are taken from two distinct locations: the wild bush garden of a neighbour, Carol, in Sydney’s Middle Harbour, and the national parks throughout the US which the artist visited some years ago. Carol’s garden is a site of familiarity, habit, and affection for Balassa. For working […]
Peter Sharp
Peter Sharp’s exhibition at Nicholas Thompson Gallery is titled Signal, which, as the artist writes, “refers metaphorically to the collision of ideas and objects that supposedly have a purpose.” It is a show of rigorous abstraction where the eye experiences a sense of jostling, between shapes, between textures, and colours, and also within the mind. […]
Rae Begley
We’re looking both down through history and up into a tentative mythology in Towers of the Goddess, 2018–22. Layers build upon each other as our eye moves towards the top of the image: starting in amongst loud, wet foliage in the foreground, a waterfall breaking through dark green vegetation, we move up through black rock, […]
Peter Hudson
Peter Hudson’s portraiture is some of his most celebrated work. Finely attuned to the sensibility of each subject, and working deftly with oils, Husdon captures the odd ordinariness – the humanness – of our cultural icons. Take, for example, his portrait of Paul Kelly, which was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2007: Kelly’s […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery
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National Works on Paper
In an introductory essay to the National Works on Paper exhibition for 2022, Jenna Lee writes that “paper is part of our everyday lives, and it’s that almost mundane, everyday quality that I find the most special. When artists work with paper as their subject, material, and medium there is a transformation that happens. We take an […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
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Mark Merrikin
The subject of my paintings is often very personal, but I approach it with a sense of vagueness, allowing the materials to inform the work. I know that painting and making is a way to pass the time; it isn’t always fun or good, but I’m privileged to make art that is reflective of my […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Process
Tagged Mark Merrikin, The Egg & Dart
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Holly Greenwood
The central figure in Cats on toast, 2022, has their back to us, the checks on a flannel shirt giving perhaps the most telling clue to their character. A swoop of black oil paint in the centre of their head could be a bald patch; equally, it could be a section of dark hair; more […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Holly Greenwood, James Makin Gallery, Olsen Gallery
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Salvatore Zofrea
Zofrea understood quite early in his development that music could nourish his creativity. He is as inspired by composers and performers as he is by painters from the early Renaissance to the modern. The language of symphonies and operas — not notes on a page, but the intensity of the engagement of multiple sounds and […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Australian Galleries, Macquarie University Galleries, Salvatore Zofre
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Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface
Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface is titled after a phrase that Binns often used when discussing her works with Anneke Jaspers (senior curator, collection, MCA) and Hannah Matthews (senior curator, MUMA) as they were carrying out research into her archive. The first works that audiences encounter in the space on the third floor of […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Vivienne Binns
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Bernhard Sachs
Sachs was renowned as a rigorous practitioner as both an artist and a teacher. He had lectured in art since 1989 at the Victorian College of the Arts and was a highly sought-after figure for artists undertaking a PhD as a supervisor. In that role he carried a reputation for being tough but fair, and […]
Painters on Pots
Good ideas don’t have to be unnecessarily complicated. Painters on Pots is straightforward enough: find some artists who work with paint, and introduce them to a new medium. Let them go somewhat wild exploring the new medium, then see what this introduction results in. For this basic idea to work, there are some ingredients required: […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Despaired Gallery, George Kennedy, Harrison Bowe, Maggie Jeffries, Sam Field, Zoe Grey
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Female Drivers
What differentiates Female Drivers from the recent tide of exhibitions of women’s work – represented in their most block-busting form by the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name – is that it is not only concerned with presenting the work of women artists, but with presenting work that is in some way about women, as artists […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Maitland Regional Art Gallery
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Ross Seaton
For many Western Australians, Ross Seaton (1944–2020) was the “Walking Man.” He is a vivid memory, a point of reference, a marker in our unfolding lives. A feature of the local landscape for decades, he pushed his wheelbarrow along Stirling Highway, making his daily journey toward the ocean. On the way, he collected cardboard and […]
Posted in Contents, Essays, Profiles, Uncategorized
Tagged Ross Seaton, The Master of Nedlands, University of Western Australia
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Letters on Ukraine: 05/08/22 – Rome, Italy
I’m in Italy visiting family during a summer overshadowed by war. Here, the progressive Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has fallen on his sword trying to fix the impossible and has followed in the footsteps of the UK by setting off a government collapse. The Italian people are dismayed and angry with what is happening. Italians […]
Posted in Ukraine
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