From the Archibald to the Mona Lisa to the selfie, portraiture is a ubiquitous genre of our time. Yet it has an urgent social undercurrent of whose image we value, and what that image speaks to—which contemporary artists like Blak Douglas, Atong Atem, Peter Drew, Yvette Coppersmith and Kate Beynon are questioning with stunning effect.
One afternoon, writer and artist Diego Ramirez met with Nadia Hernández and Jon Campbell for a drink and a parma—and to chat about their joint exhibition Speech Patterns at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
From Nick Cave to KAWS to Patricia Piccinini, artists in Freedom of Movement: Contemporary Art and Design from the NGV Collection look at the ever-blurred lines of design and art, capturing everything from the stuff we buy to fantastical realms.
The long-awaited new Sydney Modern campus, opening 3 December, will transform the Art Gallery of New South Wales—making it the largest cultural investment in Sydney since the Opera House.
Congratulations to Graeme Drendel, who has won the 2022 Doug Moran Portrait Prize for his painting of fellow artist Lewis Miller, in Australia’s richest portrait prize.
Teo Treloar has lately been collecting and illustrating editions of Albert Camus’s The Plague—a novel about, you guessed it, plagues. Now, Treloar’s stunningly detailed drawings are showing at Grafton Regional Gallery.
Lydia Wegner’s photographs urge audiences to question what they see. Wegner’s latest work at Arc One Gallery presents audiences with visual abstractions that cause reason to pause and pay attention.
“I’m doing that something humans do: I’m trying to explain this time to myself by making something from it and about it,” says artist Kate Tucker in our new podcast mini-series on art, creating and care, linking with the NETS Victoria touring exhibition Notions Of Care.
From being a carpenter on the Wollongong waterfront to working at Bunnings and then becoming a successful artist, it’s little wonder Dan Moynihan’s practice reveals a love of materials, alongside a good dose of humour—as his new show at Tolarno illustrates.
“Protesters’ willingness to put their bodies on the line for their beliefs is always inspiring,” says Palawa artist Jemima Wyman on creating art centering resistance movements. Ahead of her showing in Air at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, we talk about her first protest and what compels her to acts of resistance.
Once called ‘Unaustralian’ by their own previous funders, Soda Jerk’s latest film at Samstag Museum of Art centres the moments that have defined the last six years: a pandemic, the Trump era, QAnon, the war in Ukraine and climate disaster.
From his cosmological interests that earned an asteroid named after him, to his vibrant paintings of clouds and marine life, Torres Strait Islands artist Segar Passi is being honoured in a six-decade retrospective at Cairns Art Gallery.
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Wendy Sharpe’s expressive paintings incorporate social criticism and otherworldly dreamscapes, blending the real and imagined. With a current exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries, she reflects on her three-decade practice and that iconic painting of Magda Szubanski.
Curated by artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi, the program is centred by the theme of Rememory. Originating from author Toni Morrison, the ideas seek to explore the intersection of memory and history—revisiting, reconstructing and reclaiming histories that have been erased or repressed.
Peter Hill interviews Simryn Gill about the exhibition Stolon Press: Flat earth at Monash University Museum of Art.
