John Young has embraced the potential of technology, even while continuing to paint the old-fashioned way – very carefully. That is, with traditional oil-painting skills he refers to (not at all disrespectfully) as Jurassic technology. Downloading stock and found images from the web, from landscapes to nudes, he batches them up and has them transformed overnight via predetermined Photoshop filters into abstract drawings. These are then assessed and curated. The drawings are then painted diligently on canvases, the results utterly different to the originals, but bearing traces of colour and emotion, the essence of their original being, rather than figuration. He calls it a resonance.
Young, whose first exhibition was in 1979, is still impressed with what all this allows him to do. While a 20th-century artist might do 100 such abstract drawings in a lifetime, he has them there in an evening, ready to use as groundings for his interpretations.
Young has been working in this way for a long time now and has maintained a dual interest in the figurative and the abstract.
“I like to resuscitate and reinterpret it through the body. These abstract works are a shelter from the complete loss of a sense of corporeality in the world.”
His new exhibition at Sydney’s Olsen Gallery – his first solo show there – is divided into three different series that all form part of his long-term exploration of the interface between technology and the human body: the abstract paintings known as Spectrumfigures; chalk drawings on canvas that are more figurative; and The Bridge to Innocence and Safety which are figurative works that examine his continuing concern with “transnational humanitarianism”.
John Young
Olsen Gallery
30 May–17 June
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.
Bringing together 70 artists from 30 countries, the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art fosters connections across cultures and borders, and translates cultural knowledge for the present day.
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.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
