In winter, there is a rolling mist that lingers over the Derwent River, snaking its way from the central highlands of Tasmania to the fringes of the Hobart CBD. It is the famed Bridgewater Jerry, a uniquely Tasmanian weather phenomenon commonly seen in the cooler months. On the mornings it appears, the daylight hours move stiff and tense against the cold, despite this there remains a vibrant crispness.
Growing up in Longford, a picturesque farming community in northern Tasmania, Wolfhagen has been surrounded by vast spaces and big skies most of his life. His new body of landscape painting, Hinterlands, pays homage to unique aspects of the mountain ranges near his home, particularly the geometry of Jurassic dolerite formations and the clusters of native vegetation peppered amongst them. “Sometimes I make reference to ‘the garden’ in my titles,” he says. “I am always curious about the pursuit of design, or order in chaos, that defines a meaningful composition in nature.”
This particular skill was arguably the standout feature of Transitory Light 2017, the painting that won Wolfhagen the Lloyd Rees Art Prize earlier this year. Showing a renewed interest in alpine landscapes and a subsequent refinement of palette, Hinterlands highlights Wolfhagen’s good repute amongst Australia’s painters.
Influenced by Baroque painter Claude Lorrain’s hallmark compositions featuring “dark tree-forms framing distant views”, the paintings in Hinterlands, says Wolfhagen “employ a lot of graphic marks and hark back to my love of drawing, but are also about light and contain highly developed cloudscapes, all to heighten the drama of the experience of nature.”
Hinterlands
Philip Wolfhagen
Bett Gallery
13 October – 30 October
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.
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.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
Whether looking for the perfect Christmas gift or searching for a summer read, we have selected some of our favourite art books of 2024—spanning everything from comprehensive gallery monographs to notable exhibition catalogues and self-published artist books.
