
Truth and Beauty
The truth is often a bitter pill. As Australian history is re-examined, Judy Watson brings her artistic sensitivity and intimate knowledge to it.
The truth is often a bitter pill. As Australian history is re-examined, Judy Watson brings her artistic sensitivity and intimate knowledge to it.
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.