Melbourne Now has arrived. Featuring over 200 Victorian artists, it’s a staggering, landmark celebration of local art at NGV Australia. Ahead of the show’s opening, we asked five artists to talk through their exhibiting work.
Sarah crowEST is particularly known for her “strap-on paintings”—large, wearable objects on stretched cloth that can be exhibited or worn. Ahead of her inclusion in Melbourne Now and her solo at LON Gallery, we caught crowEST in the final days of her residency at Billilla Mansion in Melbourne, where she talks through the importance of sustainability.
In 1966, American pop artist Robert Indiana created Love, an iconic image in which the word “love” appears in red letters on a blue and green background. Since then, it’s been reproduced ad nauseam in painting, print and sculpture. Enter Melbourne-based artist Clare Longley, who repositions such romanticised imagery from a queer perspective.
Porcelain and sound waves do not immediately come to mind when thinking about textiles, yet these are the materials some artists are using to produce their textile-based work. Casting a wide net for Pliable Planes at Ballarat Art Gallery, co-curators Karen Hall and Catherine Woolley specifically looked for artists whose practice expanded the creative parameters of contemporary textiles.
For over 50 years, Peter Tyndall has relentlessly explored what it means to look at art. With an extraordinary retrospective at Buxton Contemporary, Tyndall talks about seriousness and humour, buddhism and postmodernism, his catholic upbringing, and how he looks at a work of art.
Gardens tell us a lot about the natural world and the ways in which humans respond to and shape their surroundings. Catherine Truman spent a year researching at Adelaide’s historic Carrick Hill estate, emerging with work that speaks to the tension between the constructed and natural.
Geoffrey Bartlett’s new exhibition at Australian Galleries Melbourne sees the renowned sculptor’s career, in many ways, come full circle.
“The fog that keeps my words at bay is a sieve, and the colours move through it.” Madeline Simm’s inaugural solo exhibition, Blue Skirt Waltz, presents new abstract paintings at CHAUFFEUR.
The 2023 Glover Prize has been announced, with Tasmanian-based artist Joanna Chew taking home the $75,000 prize for her painting Tender.
Congratulations to Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins, who has won the 2023 La Prairie Art Award for a series of poignant portraits representing three generations of her family members.
Darwin-based artist Dawn Beasley uses nature as a reference point for her ceramic sculptures. The third instalment in her series, Botanically Porcelain, is coming to the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art.
The night sky tells many stories. For Indigenous Australians, it is also a symbol of sovereignty. Taking over the entirety of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Black Sky asserts this sovereign vision.
The paintings of Betty Kuntiwa Pumani form a part of a larger, living archive on Antaṟa, her mother’s Country. More than maps, they speak to ancestral songlines, place and ceremony.
A presentation of works by Robert Mapplethorpe curated by the British editor Edward Enninful, Enninful x Mapplethorpe, at the 2025 Ballarat International Foto Biennale, finds resonance in opposites while turning binary thinking on its head.
Auckland-born and raised artist Lisa Reihana is ever the optimist, creating two new works signifying social cohesion to hang outside two Australian arts venues—Ngununggula, and Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks —just as dark divisions seek to undermine the value of migration and Indigenous sovereignty.
In the cavernous spaces of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, the large-scale kinetic sculptures of Arcangelo Sassolino are teetering on the brink.
An exhibition of newly commissioned works at the National Art School gallery in Sydney brings to light the historic and ongoing ties between Indigenous and Asian-Australian communities.
The central life-giving gesture of the breath is at the core of Max Athans’ first institutional solo exhibition. Their series of sculptures, collectively titled Breathform, take air into latex ‘lungs’ which create a whistle in the exhale, a deep breathy sound that echoes eerily through the galleries.
