Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest

Leyla Stevens responds to archival displacement

Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.

Jennifer Yang

Preview

The ceramics of the Central Desert

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.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Review

About Face mirrors the alluring world of contemporary portrait painting

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.

Jane O'Sullivan

Feature

Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When finally makes sense of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank. It is worth the plane flight.

In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.

Joanna Mendelssohn

Feature

Self reflections with Jack Ball

In his latest exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jack Ball challenges the extractive history of the archive while searching for shapes that can articulate the complexity of trans life.

Josephine Mead

Studio

Inside Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio

Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.

Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest