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Articles on Visual arts

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Ciara Phillips, Things Shared, 2014. Tate Photography

Turner Prize show fails to live up to potential of shortlist

Earlier this year, Turner Prize nominee Duncan Campbell said that in making films he attempts to find what the writer Samuel Beckett termed “a form that accommodates the mess”. It is exactly this search…
Minouk Lim’s Navigation ID is an extraordinary example of community engaged public art. Gwangju Biennale/ Stefan Altenburger

Art and politics at the Gwangju Biennale: Burning Down the House

Burning Down the House, curated by Brit Jessica Morgan, marks the 20th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale, currently showing in Gwangju, a city in the south-west of South Korea. Despite being one of the…
Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919). ©IWM ART 2747

World War I and the loss of artistic innocence

What the conflict would mean for British art was much debated in World War I – the question was already being asked in journals and newspaper reviews in the latter part of 1914. At the beginning debate…
David McDairmid’s exuberant artworks help us understand the changing face of HIV/AIDS art. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

From camp to gay to queer: David McDiarmid and HIV/AIDS art

At the end of July, Melbourne hosted the 20th International AIDS Conference. A huge red AIDS 2014 sign perched on the Swanston Street Bridge between Flinders Street Station and the Melbourne Concert Hall…
A new exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery in Perth puts women’s work in the spotlight. Pat Larter, Rip it up, 1994, acrylic glitter and jewels on board, 91 x 105cm, CCWA 623. Courtesy of the artist's estate

In defence of bad taste: the art of Pat Larter and Lola Ryan

On my first day as curator of the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Pat Larter and Lola Ryan’s artworks were shown to me in order to demonstrate the idiosyncrasies of the once-private collection. But…
Artists Dianne Ungukalpi Golding, Eunice Yunurupa Porter, Nancy Jackson, Winnie Woods and Melva Davies at Tjanpi Desert Weavers workshop, Warakurna, April 2011. Photo Jo Foster, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council

The Tjanpi Desert Weavers show us that traditional craft is art

For over a thousand generations Aboriginal people made no distinction between art and craft. Art was, and still is, a way of life and as much about function as it is about beauty and form. Artistic forms…
A new exhibition at New Norcia in Western Australia sheds new life on the extraordinary life of the historic township’s founder. New Norcia Museum and Art Gallery

New images of New Norcia, a Spanish mission in the bush

Driving from Perth to New Norcia to see a new exhibition devoted to the township’s founder, Bishop Rosendo Salvado, takes about two hours. It’s an enjoyable trip, cutting through the wide expanse of countryside…
Narelle Autio, Nipper II 2013, type C photograph, 110 x 160 cm (sheet) edition 1 of 5. © Courtesy the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney; and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

The Basil Sellers prize gives artists a sporting chance at success

Tonight the winner of the fourth A$100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize will be announced at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, chosen from a shortlist of 16 artists and decided by a panel of six judges…
Tim Maguire’s portrait of Cate Blanchett is one of the finalists for this year’s Archibald Prize. AGNSW

Populist candy-floss or not, the Archibald Prize soldiers on

The real spectacle of the Archibald Portrait Prize emerges behind the scenes. Each year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) loading dock turns into a frenzy of artwork arrivals and departures…
Major galleries are clamouring to acquire works by Aurukun artists – especially paintings by Mavis Ngallametta. Bush Fire at Ngak-Pungarichan, 2013. Natural ochres and charcoal with acrylic binder on linen, 200x271cm. Martin Browne Gallery

Mavis Ngallametta is causing a quiet stampede in the art market

Over the past three and a half years nearly every major public and private art collection in Australia has acquired large-scale paintings by a north Queensland artist from the Aboriginal community of Aurukun…
BP Portrait Award 2014 Shortlisted entries, L to R: Richard Twose, Jean Woods 2013; Thomas Ganter, Man with a Plaid Blanket, 2013; David Jon Kassan, Letter to my Mom, 2013. National Portrait Gallery

Portraits are a fine art, so let’s embrace the selfie

The BP Portrait Award 2014, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week, might seem to some like the celebration of a dying art. In our digital age, portraiture might seem to be less and less…
Tracey Emin, Paul Smith, Alex James, Stephen Jones, Norman Cook, Vivienne Westwood, Nick Moran, Patrick Cox, Helena Christensen and Norman Reedus. British Vogue, London, 1999. © Mario Testino

Mario Testino: how photography breached the gates of high culture

Photographic exhibitions feed the celebrity industry, in the way they exalt the status of individual photographers as well as how they represent their subjects. As such, they have had a history of being…
Yearning for the past. Beamish, The Living Museum of the North Photo: Tate Photography

The Tate taps into nostalgia, but don’t forget the future of folk

Folk is fashionable. Its latest manifestation at Tate Britain is only the most recent of stirrings – it been on the up for a number of years. Perhaps most obviously is the resurgence of folk music, which…
Reconstruction of 26 rue du Depart, Paris. © 2014 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/oHCR InternationalUSA. Photo by Paul Delbo

Piet Mondrian’s homeless abstraction comes to Liverpool

Tate Liverpool’s latest exhibition, of which I am a co-curator, is of the work of Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter and pioneer of modern abstract art who is probably best known today for his iconic grids…

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