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,...
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...
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...
There are ‘isms’, movements and ‘schools-of’ in the artistic vocabulary that, over time and with compelling evidence, end up sticking like glue...
The nineteenth century practice of “blackbirding,” as it has euphemistically become known, consisted of the widespread removal – through both coercion and force – of...
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...
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...
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,...
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,...
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...
“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...
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...
Michael Snape is probably best known as a sculptor. But he is, in fact, an artistic polymath – a painter, a writer, and an assiduous...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
