A photograph taken in 1995 is an incredible snapshot of talent, featuring seven First Nations artists who are now crucial figures in Australian art, alongside a very newly elected New South Wales premier, Bob Carr. Why was this picture taken? And what can it tell us now? Brenda L Croft reflects.
Congratulations to Wayne Quilliam for winning the 2022 National Photographic Portrait Prize for his powerful portrait of Aurukun man Eric Yunkaporta in ceremonial head-wear. Quilliam, a celebrated Aboriginal curator, photographer and filmmaker, likens his work as storytelling.
Looking at Chiharu Shiota’s art paradoxically offers an uncanny awareness of one’s bodily existence alongside the elusiveness of time. To see Shiota’s latest installation and works at Anna Schwartz Gallery is to be awe-struck.
“It’s not the last word in painting at all”: Like a Wheel That Turns at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) doesn’t focus on what painting is—but what painting can do.
Why aren’t more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in positions of power in the art world, and what needs to change? Wardandi (Nyoongar) Aboriginal woman and senior curator Clothilde Bullen explores these questions.
Several major art fairs and festivals are upcoming across Australia, from Sydney to Cairns to Darwin to South Australia—some of which are returning for the first time in several years. Whether it’s Indigenous art fairs or exciting showcases of art and performance, here’s our guide on what to see.
Traversing sculpture, painting and sound Afterburner reveals Michelle Ussher’s quest to represent and challenge understandings of femininity—particularly the shapes, expressions and actions that are associated with feminine artistic expression. View, in pictures, Ussher’s vibrant and evocative works at STATION gallery (Sydney).
“You constantly read about the revival of craft and textiles, but they’ve never gone away.” In a vast new exhibition at CAVES, over 50 artists from Australia and New Zealand shed light on the evolving conversations around textiles.
Working between Sydney and Paris, artist Mel O’Callaghan has a major new solo at Sydney’s Carriageworks. In our interview she talks about deep sea exploration, theories on the beginning of life, ancient festivals in India, and a prized mineral collection.
Although Karla Dickens’s home was spared in the recent Lismore floods, she’s attentively focused on the collective community of the town—and she’s also creating new art showing at Sullivan+Strumpf.
“It was like an open studio and an exhibition space and a home space, everything kind of intermingled in a really lovely way.”
Everyone is capable of taking on the posture of an art critic. An adult thinks their child could paint that, then a child comments their dog could draw that—and as illustrator Oslo Davis shows us, the cycle of criticism goes around.
The growing cultural interest in art books reflects the enduring power of the printed word. Jane O’Sullivan takes a closer look.
Radical Textiles, A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows us how textiles evoke material memories while keeping the radical lineage of needle and thread alive.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
In GHOSTLAND, her new exhibition at the ANU Art & Design Gallery, Julie Gough continues her lifelong inquiry into gaps and silences—while conjuring the apparitions that haunt Tasmania’s colonial past.
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
An exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane sheds a new light on Brisbane’s history, presenting a significant historical archive of photography alongside contemporary artists responding to the original source material.
