There is reason to believe that the local art world is slowly coming around to the idea of design as a legitimate form of cultural production. Indeed, the NGV’s recent launch of Melbourne Design Week (16 to 26 March) cements any suspicion that this cultural shift is real and happening.
This first iteration features the work of Australian practitioners Ash Allen, Adam Goodrum, Dale Hardiman, Trent Jansen, Guy Keulemans and Kyoko Hashimoto, Ben Landau and Lucile Sciallano, David Mutch and Elliat Rich.
Gallery director Sophie Gannon says she is “very conscious of bringing design into the context of a commercial gallery.” Accustomed to exhibiting art with a “capital A” (including the likes of Emily Ferreti and Huseyin Sami), Gannon will continue to work within the fine art installation aesthetic. “I don’t want the gallery to look like a furniture showroom for the duration of the exhibition,” she says. “I want to display the pieces in much the same way that I exhibit visual artists, rather than changing my methods because I am exhibiting design.”
Indeed, Gannon is adamant that the pieces selected for the exhibition go some way to bridging an ongoing design/art schism. Melbourne-based artist David Mutch, for instance, has produced a concrete light work that, Gannon says, is as much critical as it is functional.
Gannon is confident that there is a bright future for design in the local culture sector: “I look forward to putting together Designwork #20 and beyond in the years to come,” she declares.
Designwork #1
Sophie Gannon Gallery
14 March – 1 April
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
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.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
Radical Textiles, A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows us how textiles evoke material memories while keeping the radical lineage of needle and thread alive.
