The new year often brings catharsis, a fresh approach not weighed down by the clutter of the past. This exhibition, drawn from the QUT Art Museum’s largely post-1960 collection, dallies with a contemporary impulse to minimise, downsize and the mantra of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle.’ Curator Katherine Dionysius identifies a niche in the institutional collection, finding artists since the 1960s whose work has a reductionist aesthetic, creating a show that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Art is about creating something, an object in the world, not reducing to less. In this sense, reductionist art is such an interesting contradiction.”
What emerges in an exhibition of work of all media from the 1960s to last year is a multiplicity of conversations across the room. A major painting series by Robert MacPherson titled Trace no.2 (1977) is a grid of square canvases that segue from black through a range of shades and surfaces, finally into grey and white.
It speaks in its pattern and repetition to George Ward Tjungurraya’s Tingari Cycle (2006). Peter Atkins’s Hume Highway Project (2010) also works the grid in square canvases, but his floating lozenges of colour have a visual echo in Rover Thomas’s Red Rock Stockyard, Bow River Station (1996).
On a different register is sculpture by Sam Cranstoun, Proposal for long term sustainability: Plano II (2013), compromising spindly white constructions atop green synthetic grass. While the impetus behind these works is not related, in their paring back of an aesthetic, each celebrates restraint, what Dionysius describes as “the artist’s pursuit of the next best thing to nothingness”.
Less Than: Art and Reductionism
QUT Art Museum
18 March – 21 May
Until 2026, Wanneroo Regional Art Gallery will be showing 53 original artworks by one of the most famous artists of the 20th century: Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol ICONS includes famous works such as Elvis (1963), Campbell’s Soup Cans (1968) and Marilyn (1967).
For the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Paris-based Fondation Cartier has commissioned 14 new works by Indigenous artists across the globe, curated by renowned Kuku Yalanji artist, Tony Albert.
From revamped industrial sites to brand new spaces in Sydney, to openings in Adelaide, Melbourne, Cottesloe and Darwin—across Australia there’s a flurry of new and reopening gallery activity.
White Rabbit Gallery’s latest multimedia exhibition, A Blueprint for Ruins, explores the ongoing destruction and renewal of urban spaces in modern China, with works from over 20 contemporary Chinese artists.
“It’s a call for the celebration of the multiplicity of perspectives, and the gathering of different viewpoints.” Ahead of the Biennale’s opening this weekend, we talk with long-time collaborators Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero about how this year’s Biennale is one of celebration, not fatalism.
Annika Harding’s latest work at NorthSite Contemporary Arts, focuses on the Atherton Tablelands, exploring the tension between natural beauty, relentless meteorological forces, and the built environment that supports local agricultural communities.
