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
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.
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.
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.
Artists need not fear the spectre of AI-generated art. Instead, Oslo Davis suggests, we need to start reaping the rewards.
Anador Walsh reviews Ivan Cheng’s performance exhibition NP at Monash University Museum of Art—a three-day project, made in collaboration with a group of Year 11 students, that explores the loss of childhood innocence and role of documentation in performance.
With their iconic painted poker machines and installations, notably featured in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, the Tennant Creek Brio are now taking over Melbourne with a new show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
