undo the day
The curatorial notes for undo the day, an exhibition at Sydney’s National Art School Gallery featuring works by ten contemporary Australian artists, make no mention of the pandemic but it is hard not to see the show in light of the adjustments made to our shared consciousness over the last four years. Proceeding from the observation that […]
Fiona Currey-Billyard
An artistic life was inevitable for Currey-Billyard, who descends from a “family of artists,” her mother a visual artist, and her father a collaborator who also wrote limericks. Growing up, Currey-Billyard had always drawn, a practice “just given” in the household. She studied at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School), and rather […]
Posted in Essays
Tagged Dobell Drawing prize, fiona currey-billyard, National Art School
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Queer Contemporary
Coinciding with Sydney WorldPride 2023 and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, QUEER CONTEMPORARY 2023 comprises two major exhibitions, a suite of public programs, key community partnerships, and site activations, all hosted at the historic Darlinghurst campus in February. Oscillating between notions of queerness in historical and contemporary artworks, yet consistently re-centring on the […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged Braving Time, Fulgora, National Art School, Queer Contemporary
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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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John Olsen
In what he has previously described as a “cutting of the umbilical cord,” the young Australian painter John Olsen travelled to Europe in 1956, setting in motion a cascade of experiences that would significantly shape his world view and trajectory as an artist, none more so than his experiences in Spain. It was at the […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged John Olsen, National Art School, Ngununggula
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National Art School Graduate Shows 2021
At the close of 2021, the National Association for the Visual Arts’ I Lost My Gig survey reported that some 32,000 lost work opportunities had represented a collective income loss in the arts sector of $94 million AUD, due to our ongoing public health crisis, since July 2021 alone. According to NAVA’s research, as many as four […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged NAS, National Art School, National Art School Graduate Show, Postgrad Show, Sydney
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Valerie Marshall Strong Olsen
Valerie Strong painted a great many landscapes, to varying degrees of abstraction. Night Garden, c. 1984, is one such painting. In it, you can see Strong’s devotion to form: to line, but also to pattern and tone. From a grey-green wash flicker patches of orange and red, and beneath these the dark lines of tree trunks […]
Posted in Contents, Exhibitions
Tagged National Art School, Valerie Marshall Strong Olsen
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Guy Warren
Marking the Bend in the Track 2 (2020) is a new watercolour work on the program in ‘From the Mountain to the Sky: Guy Warren Drawings’. Looking at it, we follow an ochre path through the space of the picture, up and away to the right, the colour becoming only more insistent about itself as […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Drawing Gallery, From the Mountain to the Sky, Guy Warren, National Art School
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Paper Tigers
‘Paper Tigers: Posters From Sydney’s Long 70s’ is a celebration of Sydney’s dynamic poster art and public protest movements from the late 1960s to early ‘80s.
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Chris O'Doherty, Garry Shead, Marie McMahon, Martin Sharp, National Art School, Paul Worstead, Reg Mombassa
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Toni Warburton
A forerunner of the new wave of Australian artists employing experimental approaches to ceramics, Toni Warburton has been working with clay since the 1970s.
