To mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Archibald Prize, Art Guide asked 10 Australian artists to each choose a past winner, one from each decade.
From posters to fanzines to personal letters, Unpopular at Powerhouse Museum is a homage to global 1990s bands like Nirvana, Pavement, Fugazi, Rancid, The Amps and Sonic Youth, delving into the archives of veteran music entrepreneur Stephen Pavlovic.
Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander artist. Her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu as children during the Pacific slave trade and made to work in Australia. Togo-Brisby explores this dark history, talking through its ramifications—and how it informs her practice, with works showing at Fremantle Arts Centre.
“She hasn’t gone to art school or locked herself into a style. She has used painting, drawing, ceramics and even performance to explore different ideas relating to her engagement with the world.” Robyn Bischoff’s latest abstract works are showing at Bunbury Regional Gallery.
It’s finally been launched. A new cultural policy for Australia. After years (actually decades) of neglect, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese launched a new national cultural policy, Revive.
From climate change to the simple respite of a frosty ice cream on a boiling summer day, Swelter at Caboolture Regional Art Gallery shows how artists filter this country’s extreme heat.
The art of storytelling has been integral to Chinese culture and history for thousands of years—and White Rabbit Gallery is exploring how contemporary artists are keeping this timeless practice alive, especially in today’s digital age.
“And I definitely think that’s what landscape is for me, it is a questioning about living and life and what we do in places and what we leave behind,” says Polly Stanton in our latest podcast, talking about how her art practice looks at the entwined relationship between culture and nature.
Gail Mabo’s latest, poignant exhibition tells the story of her mother and father, Dr Bonita Mabo and land rights activist Eddie Mabo, alongside recollections of childhood.
Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins creates evocative portraits and landscape paintings exploring being a First Nations person in contemporary Australia. Her latest work Stockwoman is gracing the walls of Carriageworks for Sydney Festival, capturing her great-grandmother Hetty Perkins.
Niloufar Lovegrove’s beguiling prints at Artspace Mackay show a deft fusion of cultures that not only allows profound new perspectives on environmental crises, but is also a self-exploration.
From her feminist prints and posters of the 1970s to her later landscape paintings, Mandy Martin’s (1952-2021) retrospective at Geelong Gallery shows her long-term fight for the Australian environment.
A new exhibition at Buxton Contemporary finds a rich complexity in the shadowy terrain between life and death.
In Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie currently showing at the National Gallery of Australia, viewers are invited to share a journey through the history of modern art from across the globe.
In our ongoing series, Shelf Portraits, Art Guide writers recommend the books—recently published or deserving of more attention—that shed new light on an idea that has long simmered in the art world or has helped them see a familiar medium in a different light.
Premiering at the Sydney Film Festival, artist, curator and filmmaker Nikki Lam’s The Unshakeable Destiny trilogy, shot on 16mm, Super 8 and digital, explores her hyphenated identity as a “settler-migrant”, through an upbringing in “city-state” Hong Kong and the enduring influence this has over her artistic practice in Australia.
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.
Described as “a space for reflection, remembrance, and the sharing of truth”, Kattidj Nagãr, now showing at John Curtin Gallery, is dedicated to the Aboriginal people who once resided at the Carrolup Settlement in Western Australia.
