REVIEW | Michael Vale: Synchronicity and the theatre of the absurd
Michael Vale views colonialism as the elephant in the room when it comes to Australian history and Australian art. He observes that through a strange coincidence, or synchronicity, at the same time as the rise of the Gothic novel in Europe, the horrors imagined by the fiction writers were actually taking place in Australia through […]
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Tagged Australian Panting, Michael Vale, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, painting, Sasha Grishin, surrealism
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ESSAY | Clean Edges and a Messy Studio: The Abstraction of Evie Adasal
Evie Adasal always wanted to paint, but she hesitated. “I graduated from art school in the ‘90s in photography and film,” she recalls. “When I was at TAFE, we had a really rough painting teacher, and she scared the shit out of me, so I thought I might stick to photography.” Years later, however, these […]
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Tagged abstract painting, abstraction, dopamine, Evie Adasal, Olsen Gallery, painting, Tai Mistuji
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Tricky Walsh
Tricky Walsh appears on my laptop screen, their voice slightly distorted as we converse over distance through a shaky network from one regional part of Tasmania to another: it’s a Zoom conversation. This is how we get in touch. It’s a bit like science fiction, but it’s also a bit daggy – the future is […]
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Tagged MARS Gallery, Melbourne, painting, sculpture, tasmania, Tricky Walsh
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Daniel Weber
By his own account, Weber grew up “in the midst of the plains of Minnesota, in a small town of about 30,000 people . . . and the only escape was the library.” As he tells me, “I moved to a larger city when I was sixteen, and became aware of all of these narratives […]
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Tagged Daniel Weber, painting, Sydney, Wellington Gallery
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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 […]
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Tagged Catherine Cassidy, Defiance Gallery, painting
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Anna Johnson
Johnson’s engagement with her influences – abstract expressionism, post-impressionism, early modernism, Monet, Clyfford Still – is ambivalent, and yet unburdened with the irony that characterises a lot of work on history and the archive produced today. In an interview for Intention with Rachael Parsons, Johnson described the experience of an artist (especially, but not only a woman […]
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Tagged AK Bellinger Gallery, Anna Johnson, painting
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John Young
The youngest of four siblings, John Zerunge Young spent his childhood on the southern side of Hong Kong, in an art deco granite house that was scarred with Japanese bullet holes from the Second World War. As a child, looking out from the balcony he painted views of the sea and the sun setting over […]
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Tagged John Young, Olsen Gallery, painting, photography
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Marina Strocchi
The points of intersection between skyscraper windows in Manhattan sunset III, 2020, are live; they ring with a vibrant, almost spiritual, blue. Between them, white spaces where the lives of others would be are subtly under-painted with this same blue – underpinned by its electric energy. The painting sees Manhattan from the swaying vantage point of a […]
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Tagged Australia Galleries Melbourne, Australian Galleries, Marina Strocchi, painting, printmaking
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Donna Green
Donna Green’s beautiful Bacchanalia, 2022, is slung low beneath the weight of its own ripe fulness. Bulbous forms – at once like stone fruits, breasts, or camp confections in a storefront window – tumble over each other, enfolded in a high-gloss glaze. Aptly named for the privately funded, opulent Roman festivity known as the Bacchanal, the title […]
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Tagged ceramics, Donna Green, painting, Utopia Art, Utopia Art Sydney
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Heidi Yardley
Let’s start from the beginning. When did you realise that being an artist was the career for you? I was always drawing as a child, and when I was in high school I focused mainly on art in Years Eleven and Twelve. I didn’t think much about what a career meant; I just knew that […]
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Tagged Heidi Yardley, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, painting
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Julie Rrap
In front of Rrap’s Secret Strategies, Ideal Spaces series, 1987, viewers with an archival impulse might find themselves looking for wall text inside, or at the very least around, the image. In this photographic series, Rrap moves – usually naked to some degree, and often with markings on her body – in front of drawn reproductions of work from […]
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Tagged ARC ONE, ARC ONGE Gallery, feminist art, Julie Rrap, painting, performance, photography
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Emma Beer
There it is, striated beneath the blocks of pink – irregular, in a way which feels permissive – a few glimpses of green ground. This ground, swung behind the pink, is elsewhere left visible: drawn across the canvas of laboured learning, 2021, as a thin veil which does more revealing than hiding, shifting with the […]
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Tagged ANU, ANU School of Art & Design, Drill Hall Gallery, Emma Beer, painting
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Nick Santoro
You draw from a wide range of imagery and ideas. What are the major sources of inspiration for your works? The process for gathering content to use in my paintings is a combination of information snacking, image hoarding and autobiographical content. What I’m exploring changes rapidly, governed by anything from music, art or ideas that […]
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Tagged Melbourne Art Fair, Nick Santoro, painting, The Egg & Dart, the egg and dart
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Michael Vale
In PegLeg’s Ghost, 2021, three figures appear with bundles of cloth perching improbably on their heads. Neck-ache and gravitational dynamics aside, the nestling of lively objects into these happenstance headpieces places the picture firmly within the realm of the absurd. From two seated figures emerge small, vertical smoking structures (chimneys?), while the garb of the […]
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Tagged Martin Browne Contemporary, Michael Vale, painting
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Adam Lee: World Sick Hermit
In World Sick Hermit, Adam Lee presents a suite of new paintings that reframe concepts of interpersonal and intergenerational connectedness whilst interrogating the hierarchy of outer and inner worlds. The body of work draws its title from a phrase coined by Lee’s daughter, who once announced a feeling of homesickness for the wider world. In […]
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Tagged Adam Lee, painting, Pippa Mott, STATION, STATION Gallery
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Imants Tillers: As soon as tomorrow
In a statement accompanying the exhibition, Tillers notes that “It all began with the shock of a fire in 2019 which destroyed Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Could this have been a portent of the coming apocalypse? The devastating fires in Eastern Australia followed soon after, only to be eclipsed by a plague which is still […]
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Tagged Imants Tillers, painting, photography, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
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Madeleine Pfull: Pfull Stop
For commuters in Sydney, 12 June 2015 was a sombre day. For it was on this day that the free, tabloid newspaper mX released their last published edition. For those who don’t know, mX was a pithy commuter newspaper that’s content comprised of “celebrity gossip” (if you regard what Neil Perry did with his ponytail […]
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Tagged Chalk Horse, Emma Finneran, Madeleine Pfull, painting, portraiture
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Yvonne Boag
In Moruya Sunset 1, 2021, Yvonne Boag undertakes the painterly equivalent of holding the positive ends of two (or perhaps more – perhaps innumerable) magnets together. The logic of the painting is one of competing horizontal energies: charged shapes and colours are held in proximity, approaching each other impossibly, thrillingly. Sparks fly between a mercurial sweep of […]
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Tagged painting, Stella Downer, Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney, Yvonne Boag
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Amy Dynan
Sydney-based artist Amy Dynan uses a harmony of figuration and abstraction within her gestural skyscape artworks, revealing her approach of maximum expressivity. Dynan has been painting professionally since 2012, first capturing the likeness of her peers in hyperreal drawings. By 2017 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts, […]
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Tagged Amy Dynan, Drawing, Emma-Kate Wilson, Lindy Lee, painting, Residency, Stanley Street Gallery
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James Drinkwater
How do you describe your artistic practice to strangers? When people ask, I always tell them that I’m a house painter – because I’m inevitably covered in paint. It’s trickier when someone probes a little further. I’m a painter-sculptor. I’m the son of schoolteachers so I saw people get up and go to work every […]
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Tagged James Drinkwater, Melbourne, Newcastle, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, painting
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Timo Kube
In Dr. Robert Luzar’s essay on Sensibilities we find the claim that “audiences view objects that, more or less, resist definition and medium specificity; these might appear as paintings and sculpture but the experience in viewing the works opens up (the) senses of what they ‘are.’” Indeed, the pieces in this show confound the classic definition-by-medium that […]
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Tagged CHAUFFEUR, minimalism, painting, sculpture, Timo Kube
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Veronica Cay
conversations with my aunt, Cay’s current show with Anthea Polson Art, is named after the dialogue Cay wishes she could have had with her mother’s sister, about whom Cay knows only precious little information. What Cay does know is that this aunt, Dorothy, led what was by all accounts a vibrant life, deeply unconventional in its […]
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Tagged Anthea Polson Art, ceramics, painting, Veronica Cay
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