In the past ten days Australia has lost two important artworld figures. Both were senior artists working in Adelaide but with a reach extending far beyond the city or the nation.
The inaugural show in the new custom-designed space for Science Gallery Melbourne, MENTAL: Head Inside, is a young person-led take on mental health featuring more than 20 interdisciplinary projects from around the globe.
Based in Toronto, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore is showing her first Australian solo exhibition, creating acts of Indigenous resistance through art, language and bodies.
UK artist James Capper is bringing his insect-like, walking hydraulic sculptures to Hobart’s Mona, heralding an art practice of engineering, design and biology—all for a more sustainable future.
In 1985, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million, the most a public gallery had spent on an artwork. On year later, the painting was stolen and held ransom. Now, this unsolved mystery is being explored in the new SBS series FRAMED.
The work of Gordon Hookey is a meeting point of Indigenous resistance, activism, and the power of art—and his acclaimed paintings are currently showing in QAGOMA’s mammoth exhibition, the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10).
Jeffrey Smart’s paintings are distinctive. Sparsely populated, some of his near-empty metropolitan scenes have a melancholic, almost cataclysmic, air—like prescient glimpses of cities in lockdown—while others seem infused with an irreverent and sophisticated sense of play.
Considering most of us will be spending summer in Australia, we’ve curated our top pick of regional exhibitions to see across the country this holiday season. From Bendigo to Cowaramup to Mackay, they’re well worth making the trip for.
From his alter ego Blak Metal to exhibiting the figure of a saddened black air dancer, Steven Rhall is embarking on a new artwork: renaming Wi-Fi networks to ABORIGINAL LAND, which will be showing as part of ACCA’s vast summer exhibition Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Trained as a milliner, Chanel rebelliously shunned the restrictive corsets and frills of the Belle Époque and Edwardian fashion in favour of garments focused on comfort, function and style. Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto at the National Gallery of Victoria marks the first time a major retrospective of the designer’s work has been seen in Australia.
With textiles as her medium, Hannah Gartside engages with the histories and textures of material—and is creating new work for MCA’s Primavera, centred on five powerful women.
After experiencing months of life in lockdown, the famous still life paintings of Henri Matisse—now showing in Sydney—take on an atmosphere that’s equally charged, cataclysmic, and very still.
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