There are about 30,000 professional practicing visual artists in Australia today (see note). By professional, I mean exhibiting regularly in recognised commercial or public galleries and represented in…
The winner of this year’s McLelland Prize, Matthew Harding’s Void (2014). Stainless steel, 650.0 x 800.0 x 260.0
McLelland Prize
In Australia’s somewhat subdued public sculpture scene, the McClelland Sculpture Survey – which runs until July 19, 2015 – provides a rare opportunity for witnessing contemporary public sculpture. This…
Nola Farman’s The Lift is a key piece of Australian media art history. Photograph: Richard Woldendorp.
Nola Farman
Western Australian artist Nola Farman’s practice has never followed a predictable trajectory. Her major work, The Lift Project (1979-82), is an important and influential contribution to Australia’s new…
In the early 20th century, cubism seemed difficult and wild, and it was a favourite target of conservatives.
Juan Gris, Fantômas, 1915, National Gallery of Art. Wikimedia Commons
There’s a problem with the history of western art: we face it from the wrong side of decades of discursive dismantling. The conventional “story” of early 20th-century modernism, in which an advanced guard…
You’re in a gallery looking at Dani Marti’s It’s All About Peter. What do you do next? Photo: Jamie North.
Image courtesy of the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney.
What’s the key to understanding art? Could there be some easy steps to unpacking the meaning of an artwork? The short answer is: yes. I recently wrote an article for The Conversation called Three questions…
Paul McCarthy, the granddaddy of shock conceptual art, has gone and done it again. In a globally reported move, part-installation and part promotional-stunt to mark the imminent opening of Paris’s Foire…
How does a woman make art history, asks !Women Art Revolution, an American documentary that screened at the Melbourne Festival.
Melbourne Festival
The central premise of American director Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film !Women Art Revolution (2010), which screened at the Melbourne Festival over the weekend, is summarised near its conclusion: “When artists…
Primavera is the Italian word for springtime, and each spring since 1992 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney has a curated selection of emerging artists under 35 years old – in the springtime of their…
Why are Western Australian artists such as Flynn Talbot, whose work X Y is pictured here, left out of the bigger picture?
Flynn Talbot Studio/Undiscovered Symposium
Despite our interconnectedness through radio, television and the internet, the coverage of arts and cultural activities in Australia is viewed from a very close focus. This corrupts our understanding of…
At his current exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, Wim Delvoye’s works continue to vex ready classification. Photo: Claire Dorn.
Courtesy Galerie Perrotin
When Belgian artist Wim Delvoye broke onto the international scene back in the 1990s, he was one of those artists (like Sigmar Polke before him) that critics found difficult to pigeonhole. His works ranged…
Negotiating our position in the world has been a constant facet of Australian art.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Edmund Capon, the former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) last week commented that Australian artists remain unknown overseas because their work is “too strongly defined by place…
Jeff Wall, Untangling (1994, printed 2006), transparency in light box, AP 189.0 x 223.5 cm.
National Gallery of Victoria
Art as Therapy at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) promises to “challenge visitors to examine assumptions about themselves, society, and how art is viewed in galleries”. And it would be right…
Cullen possessed a natural likeability, even an awkward politeness.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
Adam Cullen, Australian artist and winner of the 2000 Archibald Prize, died just over two years ago at the age of 46. He spent the last three years of his life working with a young writer, Erik Jensen…
In The Boys Home, artist Zanny Begg worked with boys in juvenile detention. This image is from a project titled Rooms. Photo documentation by Alex Wisser.
The Boys Home
I entered the secretive world of a maximum-security prison for children in Sydney’s Western suburbs for four months earlier this year. My passport into this highly restrictive world was an artist residency…
Could a child have painted Picasso’s Seated Woman? That’s the wrong kind of question to ask of art.
EPA/ANDY RAIN
Art raises a lot of questions. That’s what it does. If an art work in a gallery or a news story has made you ask “what the …?”, it has already started to do its job. But for many who are not familiar with…
Damien Hirst, whose work Virgin Mother III is pictured here, has learned the lessons of personal branding.
Suzanne Gerber
Artists such as Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and more recently Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, are regularly held up as masters of self-marketing and as global artist brands. Koons, for example, is feted on…
Long term, works such as Pavilion, (interior) by Hany Armanious will pay off.
City Centre Public Art
Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore has turned me into a milk crate acolyte. Driving to work this morning, I screeched to a stop by the side of the road. Why? There was a blue milk crate lying in the gutter…
American Jeff Koons is possibly the most contentious living artist. His current retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York writes him into the contemporary canon of great living artists – but even…
A dance performance at Beijing’s Peng Hao theatre. How does context help us make meaning of works like this?
Gustavo Thomas
On the June weekend the Sydney Biennale closed, I arrived in Denmark to speak at a conference where the Greek theatre artist Alexandros Mistriotis proposed that “art liberates us from meaning”. A week…
Self-taught artist Stan Hopewell in his studio.
Photo: Frances Andrijich
This is an edited extract from Ted Snell’s book, Stan Hopewell: Facing the Stars. This is a love story! It is the story of Stan Hopewell and his beloved wife Joyce, a couple whose lives intertwined during…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne