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Articles on Visual art

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Detail from Little Big Woman: Condescension, Debra Keenahan, 2017. Designed and made by Debra Keenahan, Photograph by Robert Brindley.

Friday essay: the female dwarf, disability, and beauty

For centuries, women with dwarfism were depicted in art as comic or grotesque fairytale beings. But artists are challenging these portrayals and notions of beauty and physical difference.
A detail from Mirka Mora’s Perth Festival Mural 1983; synthetic polymer paint on tin, 6 panels, each 120 x 280 cm (approx.) Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, gift of Paul Swain, 2015.

Diaries, petticoats and copious research: a rare glimpse into Mirka Mora’s artistic process

In 1983, Mirka Mora painted a 21-metre mural in the forecourt of the Perth Concert Hall. The story of this remarkable painting’s creation is fascinating.
Family time. Pawel Kuczynski

Imagining a better world: the art of degrowth

To fix the world’s ecological crises we’ll have to make some tough choices, particularly living with less stuff. Art can play an essential role in imagining and communicating a more sustainable future.
Paul Uhlmann, Batavia 4th June 1629 (night of my sickness), 2017, oil on canvas (detail, one of three panels). Courtesy of the artist

Picturing the unimaginable: a new look at the wreck of the Batavia

The shipwreck of the Batavia and subsequent murders of 115 men, women and children have inspired many retellings. A new exhibition combines art and science to find new angles on an old tale.
Detail from NigeI Milsom (Australia, 1975–), Judo House Part 6 (The White Bird), 2014–15 oil on linen, 230 x 194 cm. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and yuill|crowley, Sydney. Photo: Art Gallery of New South Wales

Sex and spirit: the many faces of ecstasy

The Ecstasy of St Teresa is the point of departure for a new exhibition examining ecstasy in all its guises, from the sexual to the spiritual to the banal.
Detail from Fred Williams You Yang Pond 1963. oil on composition board Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Gift of Godfrey Phillips International Pty Ltd 1968 © Estate of Fred Williams

Fred Williams in the You Yangs: a turning point for Australian art

A new exhibition features more than 50 works by Fred Williams, centred on the You Yangs peaks, west of Melbourne. They illuminate a breakthrough moment in Australian art.
Detail from Jenny Watson’s The Pretty Face of Domesticity, 2014, oil and synthetic polymer paint on velvet striped shantung. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Transit, Mechelen ©the artist

A maverick on fabric: the strange, unconventional art of Jenny Watson

A major exhibition of Jenny Watson’s work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art spans 40 years in the creative life of a rule-breaking Australian artist.
Detail from Katsushika Hokusai, The great wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki namiura), (1830–34), from the Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji (Fugaku-sanjū-rokkei) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1909 (426-2)

Friday essay: from the Great Wave to Starry Night, how a blue pigment changed the world

Hokusai’s Great Wave is the enduring image of Japanese art. Less well known is the story of its primary pigment - Prussian blue - which was created in a lab accident in Berlin and sparked ‘blue fever’ in Europe.
A robot sculpts a recreation of the Ancient Greek work Laocoon and his Sons, which was exhibited in Linz last year. Ars Electronica/Flickr

Robot sculpture, coming to a gallery near you

Artists invented the word ‘robot’, but now robots are becoming artists, or at least assistants, themselves. As robots get smarter, artists will find more and more uses for them, particularly in sculpture.
Four Seasons of the Canadian Flag, painted by Maxwell Newhouse for John Burge. (Maxwell Newhouse)

Powerful painting inspires composer to connect Canadians

Composer John Burge speaks of his drive to create a musical piece to mark Canada’s 150th year of confederation and to capture our collective experiences.
Detail from Percy Leason, Thomas Foster, 1934, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 60.8 cm, State Library Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of Mrs Isabelle Leason, 1969 (H32094) © Max Leason

Friday essay: painting ‘The Last Victorian Aborigines’

Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
Detail of Jim Dine, The mighty robe I, 1985. Colour lithograph with relief printing from polymer plates, 61.3 x 50.7 cm (image and plate), 89.2 x 63.4 cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the artist, 2016, 2016.806, © Jim Din

Here’s looking at: Jim Dine’s The mighty robe

Jim Dine and other pop artists like Andy Warhol took everyday things and transformed them into magical objects. In his prints a robe could become a self-portrait, a president, or a hero.
Untitled (all), Hans-Jörg Georgi, 2010–15, Courtesy of The Museum of Everything. Moorilla Gallery, Courtesy of Atelier Goldstein and The Museum of Everything (installation by Lutz Pillong)

The compulsion to create: ‘outsider art’ at MONA’s The Museum of Everything

MONA’s latest exhibition draws on the work of people - patients, housewives, hermits - who were compelled to create, raising age-old questions about how we define art.
Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2011. Stainless steel, 154 x 154 x 37 cm © the artist, image courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London

In a fractured world, Eurovisions opens a dialogue through art

EuroVisions: Contemporary Art from the Goldberg Collection presents 64 works by European artists. Its best moments are both intimate and inquisitive.

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