Wegman’s portraits are more than just uncanny curios. He treats each of his subjects with the kind of respect that is typically afforded to a human sitter, and the kind of candour that is only afforded to man’s best friend.
Family and national history are tied up for Phuong Ngo, who has amassed an archive tracing Vietnam’s tumultuous past.
Both Frida and Diego were productive and intensive artists, so they collected photographs as iconography to paint from.
In These Hands expands into a broad survey, marking out the diverse practices of some 28 living Ernabella painters, ceramicists, punu (timber) workers and weavers working with tjanpi desert grass.
Since embarking on a creative path only a mere 15 years ago, Yolŋu artist Gunybi Ganambarr has been continuously praised for his weaving of Indigenous forms and traditional stories with a contemporary sensibility.
“In this new body of work my paintings focus on houses that were influenced by the trend of modernism that crept into the suburbs, mainly in the 1960s,” says Sweaney.
The work of James Geurts traverses a range of territories: fault lines in Bendigo, archaeological sites in Melbourne, Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory, tectonic plates colliding in Italy and two different points on the meridian.
In her solo show Extra, Adrienne Doig stitched herself into reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry. This cheeky act of historical revision highlights the fact that in all propaganda, as in all histories, the officially sanctioned version is never the whole story.
Milledge’s visual language slips between abstract painting and witchy mysticism; the connections between work and title often oblique. Is gazing at a painting and trying to divine its meaning really so different from reading entrails or casting bones?
Despite the health risks associated with smoking, the act has played a shifting emblematic role across cultural history.
At first glance, Nick Cave’s Until is a charm offensive: a crowd-pleasing, selfie-backdrop, colour-and-movement spectacle complete with accompanying gift shop, but there are tougher meanings here too.
Bright, arresting portraits were on the hit list for National Portrait Gallery curator Christopher Chapman when he started putting together a new show to help celebrate the gallery’s 20th anniversary.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Julie Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in the southern hemisphere, now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, attempts to harness the urgency and energy of the Ethiopian-born New Yorker’s multilayered painting practice.
