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 […]
Posted in Profiles
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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Kon Gouriotis OAM in conversation with Joe Furlonger
You’re invited! This Saturday, 29th of June at 3pm, Artist Profile’s editor, Kon Gouriotis, will be in conversation with Joe Furlonger, at Defiance Gallery, Sydney, to open Furlonger’s new exhibition: Landscape. A long-time lover of Furlonger’s work, Kon will be chatting to him about his methods, practice and career in what we know will be […]
Posted in Events
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Joe Furlonger, Kon Gouriotis
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6 × 6 × 6” Miniature Sculpture Show
The Miniature Sculpture Show has hosted a staggering number of artists since its first iteration in 1996, held at the original Defiance Gallery premises in Newtown. The gallery’s aim, for twenty-six years, has been to develop a greater public understanding of the place of sculpture in contemporary Australian art, and the Miniature Sculpture Show has been […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged 6 × 6 × 6” Miniature Sculpture Show, Defiance Gallery
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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 […]
Clara Hali
Rendered any less quietly, the surfaces in Clara Hali’s Hip Hanger I might appear to slide across each other, or even to flit and slip, mercurially. Surface is abundant in this work, where five discrete forms – each something more complicated, and more multiple, than a perfect cube – jostle around a centre of gravity created […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Clara Hali, Defiance Gallery, sculpture
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Catherine Cassidy
In a recent statement, Cassidy described her interest in deep ecological time, as it changes and sculpts the land on which she works. Travelling as far north as the Gregory River, in to the Finke River, and out to Lake Eyre, Cassidy observes the marks that the passage of millennia leaves around her. “I find […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Catherine Cassidy, Defiance Gallery, painting
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In Miniature
From Paleolithic Venus figurines, whose creation dates from 26,000 to 21,000 years ago, to the Marian relics of contemporary Catholicism, childhood toys, and the kitsch of the souvenir shop, sculpture at a small scale is embedded in the material and psychic fabric of our lives. Sometimes, as in the totemic object or the religious relic, […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Miniature Sculpture Show
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Peter Godwin
Peter Godwin takes heart from Picasso’s famous line about Cézanne’s anxiety. It seems to justify his own late-blooming career as an artist who only began to exhibit regularly after the age of 50, enjoying instant success. He once explained his reluctance to show his work by saying he wanted it to be like a brick […]
Posted in Essays, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Peter Godwin
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Ann Thomson: Osmosis
When Ann Thomson spoke to Bridget Macleod in Artist Profile Issue 35 (2016), she explained that ‘I put my mind into neutral when I paint, and when I’m painting I’m painting.’ From this ‘neutrality’ emerges its opposite: boldly expressive, gestural and memory-charged paintings which work across the figurative and the abstract at once. Since graduating […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles, Reviews
Tagged Ann Thomson, Defiance Gallery, Osmosis
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Charmaine Pike
‘Rituals of the herd’ marks Charmaine Pike’s first Sydney exhibition since 2017. Moving to the next body of work after a successful exhibition, the artist found her work was ‘getting too tight and a little hard edged.’ She was losing the looseness of line that she is known for and decided to take some time […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles, Uncategorized
Tagged Charmaine Pike, Defiance Gallery, Rituals of the Herd
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Defiance Award
Willemina Villari’s work responds to landscape — that is, both the genre of painting and the artist’s own surrounds, soaked with feeling and memory as they are for her. Villari’s response to these art-historical and personal landscapes, precisely, is to break their forms down, and play variations on their themes. Colours become saturated, gently modulated, […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Defiance Gallery, Kyle Murrell, Nock Art Foundation, Paddington Art Prize, Willemina Villari
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Mary Place Gallery
Campbell Robertson-Swann and Lauren Harvey, art dealers with a sense of history, have taken over the lease of the ground floor of Mary Place Gallery for 2018 with the aim of doing quality shows by established artists.
