The new year often brings catharsis, a fresh approach not weighed down by the clutter of the past. This exhibition, drawn from the QUT Art Museum’s largely post-1960 collection, dallies with a contemporary impulse to minimise, downsize and the mantra of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle.’ Curator Katherine Dionysius identifies a niche in the institutional collection, finding artists since the 1960s whose work has a reductionist aesthetic, creating a show that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Art is about creating something, an object in the world, not reducing to less. In this sense, reductionist art is such an interesting contradiction.”
What emerges in an exhibition of work of all media from the 1960s to last year is a multiplicity of conversations across the room. A major painting series by Robert MacPherson titled Trace no.2 (1977) is a grid of square canvases that segue from black through a range of shades and surfaces, finally into grey and white.
It speaks in its pattern and repetition to George Ward Tjungurraya’s Tingari Cycle (2006). Peter Atkins’s Hume Highway Project (2010) also works the grid in square canvases, but his floating lozenges of colour have a visual echo in Rover Thomas’s Red Rock Stockyard, Bow River Station (1996).
On a different register is sculpture by Sam Cranstoun, Proposal for long term sustainability: Plano II (2013), compromising spindly white constructions atop green synthetic grass. While the impetus behind these works is not related, in their paring back of an aesthetic, each celebrates restraint, what Dionysius describes as “the artist’s pursuit of the next best thing to nothingness”.
Less Than: Art and Reductionism
QUT Art Museum
18 March – 21 May
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.
Now showing at Home of the Arts (HOTA), the sophomore Gold Coast Triennial, Here and Now, brings together 42 contemporary artists to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community.
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.
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.
