Author Archives: Artist Profile
REVIEW | The Volcanic Sublime: Werner Herzog’s The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft
In 1991, Maurice and Katia Krafft died during the Mount Unzen eruption on Japan’s island of Kyushu. Herzog’s documentary does meditate on their deaths and the notion of “impending doom,” but his concerns are the Kraffts’ humanity and their mythic imagery. He is not interested in the couple as people per se – their lives […]
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Tagged Aleks Wansbrough, Katia and Maurice Krafft, The Fire Within: A Requiem For Katia and Maurice Krafft, Werner Herzog
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REVIEW: The Talented Arrowsmith-Todd
Ruby Arrowsmith–Todd started attending the AGNSW film program in its early days as a self-educated, die-hard film fan, immersing herself in the cinematic sea of curator Robert Herbert’s vision. His film program ran for seventeen years before his untimely death. He would be a mentor for Arrowsmith-Todd, as well as a close friend, and under […]
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Tagged Art Gallery of New South Wales, H. R. Hyatt-Johnston, Ruby Arrowsmith–Todd, Sydney Cinémathèque
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PROFILE | Jim Lambie: The Language of the City
For most painters, tape has a prophylactic function. Stuck temporarily onto a canvas (or a doorframe, for that matter), tape protects what lies beneath or preserves the integrity of a newly painted edge or line. There are figurative muralists like the Tape Art duo Michael Townsend and Leah Smith; there have been moments in recent […]
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Tagged Jack Howard, Jim Lambie, Jim Lambie Cool Breeze 2026, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Zobop
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PROFILE | Deborah Halpern: Whimsical Joy
Deborah Halpern’s studio is engulfed with works in progress occasionally dispersed with other images and sculptures that illicit happiness. In the vast double window space, Halpern is surrounded by her creatures in various states of becoming. Sculptures in their nascent fibreglass stages are lined up on the shelves, others hang from the ceiling on self-crafted […]
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Tagged Angel 1988, Deborah Halpern, Dove 2024, National Gallery of Victoria
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PROCESS | Catherine Clayton-Smith
I recently left my home-studio on the Vaucluse clifftops in Sydney, with the whale and ocean views, and have set up a new studio in Collingwood, Melbourne. At the time of writing, I am deep in preparation for my solo exhibition with Olsen Gallery, in February 2026. Just like moving cities, beginning a new series […]
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Tagged Catherine Clayton-Smith, Olsen Gallery
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PREVIEW | The 2026 Beechworth Biennale
On a research trip to see the disused Mayday Hills Asylum, where Mike Parr will create his video projection on the exterior of the Birches building for the upcoming 2026 Beechworth Biennale, I had the opportunity to meet with Nina Machielse Hunt. I asked her about the event’s genesis. “During the COVID-19 lockdowns I home-schooled […]
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Tagged Beechworth Biennale; Dr Peter Hill;, Locust Jones, Nina Machielse Hunt
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REVIEW | Ken Done: Done Right
The exhibition opens with paintings that place Done in conversation with some of the great names of art history. He has always been something of an iconoclast, a painter unafraid of drawing inspiration from others while insisting on his own distinct voice. One of the early highlights, Starry, starry, starry night, 1998, is an emphatic […]
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Tagged Bradley Vincent, Gold Cost, Home of the Arts, HOTA, Ken Done, Ken Done: No Rules, Queensland
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ESSAY | Part 1: Does the demand for accountability really account for art?
Museums and galleries often attempt to decolonise their collections and embrace diversity, equity and accessibility by ditching the elevated status of the artist. Yet artist narratives still reign supreme as we are encouraged to judge the work through the creator’s biography. Suzanne Cotter, the Museum of Contemporary Art director, is quoted as saying, “if you […]
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Tagged Aleks Wansbrough, Artist Profile Issue 72, Donald Friend, Frida Kahlo, Guernica, Khaled Sabsabi, Picasso
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REVIEW: Thomas Demand: The Object Lesson
Kaldor Public Art Project 38 is in the Naala Badu building (the term for “seeing waters” in the Gadigal language). Demand, as it happens, has an indirect affiliation with Naala Badu. Over the years, he conducted research visits to Tokyo at SANAA, the distinguished architectural firm led by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, responsible for […]
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Tagged Alan Krell, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of NSW, Artist Profile Issue 73, Kaldor Public Art Project, Kaldor Public Art Project 38, Thomas Demand
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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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