Art Guide Australia

Three artists talk about creating in institutional spaces “never meant for you”

Andy Butler, Lisa Hilli and James Nguyen each engage the power dynamics that shape public culture. Their works are informed by personal histories of migration from Southeast Asia, and they have a mutual crossover of experience—being one generation away from the village, they now navigate spaces founded on exclusion and prestige. They speak to this in their incredibly insightful three-way conversation.

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In a time of funding crises for experimental spaces, five artists reflect on their early experimental works

Artist-run and experimental spaces are central to Australian art. While scores of such spaces exist throughout Australian art history, we asked five artists—Bonita Ely, David Chesworth, Diego Ramirez, Kenny Pittock and Michael Lindeman—to tell us about their early works in experimental spaces, and how these formative experiences became pivotal to their practices.

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Louise Bourgeois, Wassily Kandinsky and Tacita Dean are coming to Sydney

Summer 2023-2024 will see three major, pioneering artists showing across the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

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Graeme Drendel has won the 2022 Doug Moran Portrait Prize

Congratulations to Graeme Drendel, who has won the 2022 Doug Moran Portrait Prize for his painting of fellow artist Lewis Miller, in Australia’s richest portrait prize.

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“Part time machine and part time capsule”: Celebrating Melbourne Fringe Festival

The ground-breaking and historic Melbourne Fringe Festival is being celebrated in a major exhibition at the State Library of Victoria. The show reflects on 40 years of Fringe while also looking 40 years ahead.

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Elisabeth Cummings and the art of looking

One of Australia’s most regarded living artists with a 60-year practice, Elisabeth Cummings creates captivating paintings that move in and out of abstract interiors, landscapes and still life. View, in pictures, Cummings’s enthralling new work at King Street Gallery on William.

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Artists revealed for Melbourne/Naarm NOW 2023

Celebrating the art and design of the local Victorian community with over 200 artists and makers, Melbourne/Naarm NOW is returning to the The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, following its triumphant 2013 iteration.

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Kendal Murray’s playful miniature worlds

Kendal Murray’s miniature sculptures are a fascinating combination of materials including repurposed domestic objects ranging from crockery and compact mirrors to children’s toys. For Murray, these items become the foundation for her to create new worlds. Murray’s captivating and inventive works are now showing at Flinders Lane Gallery.

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Always Already: Remembering Damiano Bertoli

In late 2021 Melbourne artist Damiano Bertoli died unexpectedly. He was 52. An artist who worked across many forms, Bertoli was deeply embedded in the Melbourne arts community. For Bertoli’s retrospective at Neon Parc, we asked artists Darcey Bella Arnold and Yanni Florence, writer Amelia Winata, and Neon Parc director Geoff Newton, to each reflect on one of Bertoli’s works.

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Rae Begley captures our shifting landscapes

There’s a meditative, otherworldly quality to Rae Begley’s photographs, which are moving for their depiction of diverse, geological landscapes. View, in pictures, Begley’s On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing now showing at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.

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Sustaining Country: The stories behind four artworks in Emu Sky

Emu Sky invites audiences to reflect on the importance of respecting, resourcing and valuing Indigenous knowledge of Country. This vast exhibition, held at Melbourne University’s Old Quad, showcases work from more than 30 Aboriginal community members across south-eastern Australia. Learn the stories behind four featured artworks.

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“A monumental sculpture”: Margaret Rarru Garrawurra wins the 2022 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards

Congratulations to Margaret Rarru Garrawurra for winning the 2022 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA). Her award-winning work powerfully references her cultural identity and the long-lasting relationships between Yolŋu people and the people of Indonesia—and it’s exhibiting in Darwin alongside other NATSIAA winners and finalists.

Editorial Team