From Frida Kahlo to Leonardo da Vinci, the really famous artists tend to be from elsewhere and long gone. But every year the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival turns the spotlight on local artists who are still going strong.
Highlights include: jeweller Catherine Truman’s solo show, No Surface Holds, which is part of the JamFactory’s Icon series; Domestic Arts by Sera Waters at ACE Open; and Avatar by Christopher Orchard at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In conjunction with his Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) solo show, Orchard will also be conducting a drawing class in the gallery.
Orchard is the 2017 SALA Featured Artist and the subject of the SALA monograph, Christopher Orchard: The Uncertainty of the Poet. Since the turn of the 21st century he has been painting and drawing a stocky bald gent in a suit and tie. In addition to the AGSA show, Orchard’s portly man can be found in a solo show at BMG Art.
It was also announced last week that glass artist Clare Belfrage will be the SALA Festival Featured Artist for 2018.
Now in its 20th year, with some 660 events, including hundreds of exhibitions, cycle tours, a Dada inspired dance, an art dinner party, drawing classes, lectures and 120 open studios, the SALA Festival proves that art in South Australia is alive and well.
SALA Festival
Various venues
1 August – 31 August
South Australian photographers Trent Parke & Narelle Autio and Alice Blanch have taken out the final two prizes in the 2017 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival Awards.
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.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
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.
Born in 1948, Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto works with photography, site-specific sculpture and architecture. Time Machine at the Museum of Contemporary Art surveys over five decades of his work, highlighting his conceptual approach to images and his continual investigation of the photographic form.
