Issue 38
It is astonishing today how the narrative of an artist’s work can alter with new conditions. In this issue of Artist Profile it appears differences in narrative are inevitable. Exposure to new places, cultures and histories can often release the unexpected in the artist’s chosen medium.
In Issue 38 of Artist Profile the cover story on John Firth-Smith has a fresh and objective narrative. After 50 years of painting by Firth-Smith we contemplate why his paintings have a crisper tactile quality, an immediacy and how these paintings explore his life and that of Hill End.
ISSUE
Cult of the Curator by Ashley Crawford
COVER FEATURE
JOHN FIRTH-SMITH by Judith Pugh, photography by Stephen Oxenbury
PROFILES
FIONA MCMONAGLE by Lucy Stranger
ZOE YOUNG by Bridget Macleod
ANNA PLATTEN by Fulvia Mantelli
ROBERT BESANKO by Kon Gouriotis
JOE FROST by Georgina Cole
MICAHEL BUZZACOTT by Sonia Legge
DEBRA DAWES by Kon Gouriotis
PREVIEW
Preview: Mami Kataoka’s Biennale of Sydney, by Michael Young
Archive: James Doolin, by Paul McGillick
Project: Mai Nguyen-Long’s Vietnamese residencies
Process: George Tilianakis
Process: Chase Archer
Preview: The National, by Melissa Pesa
View Australia
Discovery: Martin George
In Australia, political cartoons were altered by several events during the 1960s: the arrival of Les Tanner’s (1927‒2001) instinctual wit at The Bulletin, Bruce Petty’s...
Recognition of the importance of early bark paintings and their link to the world’s oldest continuing culture, is what makes them both highly sought and...
I had come to see my daughter sing in Deborah Kelly’s Creation Choir and was fortunate enough to make it inside the gallery for the...
Cuban-born, Brisbane-based artist Jorge Mariño Brito’s practice unfolds across two material registers that are best understood not as parallel tracks but as entwined explorations. Both...
The first work you encounter in Edge City is a gate, Settlement #8, 2025. Not one to pass through (not anymore), but a threshold nonetheless....
Designed to impress, the number and size of paintings—twenty-nine at nine square metres each and one even bigger—are a spectacle, lifting the exhibition from an...
Skilfully assimilating secondary sources throughout Paris in Ruins, Smee at the conclusion of Part One, “Salon of 1869,” writes that Auguste Renoir’s and Claude Monet’s...
Multidisciplinary artist Shireen Taweel looks skyward, into the night and beyond, with her exhibition the trig point. Drawing on fieldwork in 2025 at the Siding...
It was back in 2011 that Pip Wallis, senior curator at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), remembers first seeing the work of Balinese...