After Canadian painter Mary Riter Hamilton was rejected for service as a war artist because she was a woman, she trekked battlefields to create more than 320 works that recall the missing soldiers.
Flies have long held symbolic meaning in the history of art. In portraits made in Renaissance Europe, the presence of a fly symbolizes the transience of human life.
For the first time in its 99 year-history, the Archibald Prize has been won by an Indigenous painter. The Wynne and Sulman Prize winners also signal a time of change.
Decades of under-funding have left many Australian art schools in a perilous state. And the present political and intellectual hostility to the creative arts is threatening their very existence.
In a system that treats people as objects to be counted, chained, searched and assigned a number, art is a way for prisoners to reassert their agency – and reclaim their lives.
Artist Edvard Munch depicted despair provoked by disease in turn-of-the-century works. In these coronavirus times, his iconic image speaks to our anxieties about illness and societal collapse.
At a time when surrealists were objectifying women’s bodies, American artist Dorothea Tanning was looking deeper at the transformative potential of female experience and the unconscious.
Though galleries have since closed their doors, this reviewer got to see Mavis Ngallametta’s works in all their glory. Their birdseye view of Country provides a perspective we’re missing right now.
Hugh Ramsay’s Two girls in white, was painted just two years before he died at the age of 28 in 1906. It is the central work in the National Gallery of Australia’s survey exhibition.
The Dutch master has intrigued art-lovers for four centuries. His strength in depicting the human experience compels audiences even after four hundred years.
Kate Flint, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Images of wildfires are powerful, but can make climate catastrophe seem like something spectacular and distant. So some artists are focusing on the plants and bugs in our immediate surroundings.
Many Renaissance-era masterworks depicted rape and sexual assault as erotic. Beginning in the 1970s, artists worked to redefine rape as a crime of aggression and act of female subjugation.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne