Louise Martin-Chew is a freelance writer and PhD candidate at the University of Queensland (Creative Writing) where she is working on artist biography. Her most recent book is Linde Ivimey, published by UQ Art Museum, Brisbane, 2012.
Ari Athans began her professional life as a working geologist and these concerns permeate her paintings.
At the heart of this exhibition are three figurative works made in 2014. These were also key to his survey exhibition at Brisbane’s QUT Art Museum in 2015, and they reflect his activism and the ongoing trauma of the anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965.
The Nolan slates are rapidly executed small paintings on irregularly-shaped broken tiles, salvaged from a building site close to Sidney Nolan’s Melbourne studio in the early 1940s. They have extraordinary power, especially for such small works.
Outside the art scene, it may not be understood that, for the selected Australian artist, the Venice Biennale is an opportunity of Olympian stature.
The first major show of Sherman’s work in Australia since 2000.
For years I have been inspired by the stories and images of the Torres Strait islands above Cape York.
Artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal’s approach is not merely statistical: her grasp of Indigenous practices, thought, history and politics is positioned as central to this Biennale.
Visual arts may have supporters who contributed more money but Gordon Darling was our most important, long-term and passionate advocate.
