Big, gutsy, unforgettable work! Their size represents something of Barbara’s passion for people. She loves their stories, their imperfections, their raw character. The colour of humanity is right out there, proud and strong. The works are physically large, painted on printed fabric which is Barbara’s trademark style. This method of painting on the floor means that she can create a ‘studio’ anywhere in the world.
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.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Two exhibitions in Sydney are showcasing interdisciplinary research on climate change communicated in artistic ways.
Natalya Hughes has a conflicted fascination with modernist men like Freud, Kirchner and de Kooning. Jane O’Sullivan takes a look at The Interior, the Institute of Modern Art monograph on her recent practice, and discovers difficult and provocative questions about not just the representation of women in art and culture, but also the careers of women artists in Australia.
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.
