One afternoon, during an event at the Sydney College of the Arts, Alex Gawronski looked up from an elaborate cheese platter and turned to Justene Williams, his fellow teacher. “If I ever gave up art,” he said, intoxicated by the pungent stink, “I would make cheese in a cave.”
What was meant as an offhand remark has since gone on to become something more serious. He hasn’t given up art, though, and, at the time of writing, hasn’t yet hunkered down in a cave. But he has, with Williams, curated Big Cheese, a group exhibition at Contemporary Art Tasmania all about his favourite milk curd product.
Cheese usually arrives at art galleries on platters, not as art hung on the walls. But it has its art historical credentials, Gawronski explains, appearing in Dutch still life paintings and influencing Salvador Dali, whose soft clocks were inspired by the sight of Camembert melting in the sun.
Even so, Gawronski and Williams aren’t out to make a straightforward homage to fromage. Some of the artists involved are taking a tangential approach to the subject; Daniel McKewen, for example, broaches the topic in a more linguistic sense with a spin on ‘cheesy’ sitcoms.
“There’s definitely a sense of the absurd and the surreal,” Gawronski says of the works in general. It’s an appropriate angle for the subject matter, which, while it may seem a mundane foodstuff, has what Gawronski describes as something abject and weird to it.
“When you think about it, in a way what you’re eating is more or less something rotten,” he says. On top of the art itself, there will, of course, be cheese to eat at the exhibition opening. Gawronski made only one request: that it be as stinky as possible.
Big Cheese
Contemporary Art Tasmania
9 June – 17 July
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.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
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.
Now showing at RMIT Gallery, This Hideous Replica is a holistic experimental art undertaking, co-curated by Sean Dockray and Joel Stern, which encompasses an exhibition, performance programs, publishing and much else.
A new event has arrived in Melbourne’s cultural calendar with the inauguration of the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: an exhibition that aims to showcase the breadth and diversity of contemporary sculpture in Victoria.
Helen Mueller has been printmaking for 25 years, but moving to Hobart four years ago shifted her focus to the local natural environment. Now her delicate prints, made with materials foraged from the forest floor, are showing at Handmark Gallery.
