In Sam Michelle’s exhibition Play at Martin Browne Contemporary, oil paintings of flora, textiles and vessels become metaphors for childhood creativity—a spirit that adulthood often risks losing.
Kaspar Schmidt Mumm’s practice spans painting, costume and performance,and he uses local waste and rented equipment to create installations that can be made from scratch at each new location. Having been awarded the 2023 Porter Street Commission, his large-scale participatory sculpture ROCKAMORA is now being shown at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
Pierre Bonnard is known for his vivid landscapes and interior settings, and this winter the National Gallery of Victoria will host his work within the scenography of renowned Iranian-French architect and designer, India Mahdavi.
Perhaps it’s related to contemporary life, but the spiritual in art feels central at this moment. Now, as part of RISING Festival, the spiritual practices and connections of First Nations artists are taking over a historic Melbourne site.
Victoria’s flagship festival of music, food, art and culture is back, starting 7 June. With 185 events, here’s our recommendations of what to see—from Cate Blanchett as a tiger in a supermarket to First Nations artists connection to the spirit world.
Rembrandt is arguably one of the most influential and revered artists in history. Now, the NGV is putting on the most comprehensive exhibition of his vast oeuvre in more than 25 years.
Jonathan Jones’s National Gallery of Australia exhibition takes cue from a 32,000-year-old grindstone used for Aboriginal breadmaking. In an extremely thoughtful conversation with Timmah Ball, Jones talks about how this long precedes Western food production—but questions if people understand what this truly means.
Before Philippa Cullen’s untimely death, the artist, who was prominent in the early 1970s, envisioned “a new medium in which dance is inseparable with technology, music and lighting”. Fifty years later, her work is at McClelland Sculpture Park+ Gallery.
The Brooklyn-based artist was the editor, model, stylist and photographer on a 2018 project, ‘Indigenous Woman Magazine’, now showing at Cairns Art Gallery.
Congratulations to Ida Sophia who has won the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for her performance-based video work, Witness, which is informed by the South Australian artist’s early childhood experience of watching her father’s baptism.
With four decades of propelling dance and choreography into museums and galleries, Shelley Lasica has transformed Australian art. Now, along with seven performers, she’s delivering WHEN I AM NOT THERE at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Known for expressing children’s emotional complexity, Yoshitomo Nara’s first Australian solo displays an artist resurrecting his practice after tragedy, showing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Known as a great avant-garde painter, the late John Nixon also created hundreds of prints—which, as those who knew Nixon can attest, exemplify his minimalism, experimentalism, and his interlacing of life and art. John Nixon—Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints is currently on display at Geelong Gallery.
Whether scouting the perfect gift or searching for a summer read, our editors have picked their top art books of 2023—spanning everything from a history of ceramics, women and spiritualism, and First Nations practices.
Since the early 1990s, British artist Tacita Dean has gifted us myriad artworks on the intimacy, unexpectedness, and materiality of film and image making. With a new survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, we look at Dean’s tracing of history and chance.
The grassroots women’s art collective Womanifesto, which formed in Thailand in 1995, did not shut down with the rest of the world in 2020. Instead, it adapted, and now the works made by the Sydney contingent during that time are showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Kirtika Kain’s Western Sydney apartment on Dharug Country is crowded with boxes of materials and new canvases. She came back from a residency in Italy in late 2022 and since then she’s been living alongside her work, preparing for her solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 and for the Biennale of Sydney next year. The cohabitation has been intense and sometimes messy, but Kain says studio life is teaching her new confidence.
