Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Rear view 2018 (still),
high definition digital video, multi-channel sound, 85:11 mins
Courtesy of the artists Photo: Andrew Curtis
Through animation, video, light and sound, Theatre is Lying exposes how visual art, performance and theatrical devices can interrogate what is real and what is not.
Detail from Alex Seton’s A Durable Solution? - a series of memorial plaques naming the 12 men who have died under our ‘care’.
Sullivan & Strumpf
Alex Seton’s sculpture A Durable Solution? dominates the protest exhibition at the forthcoming ALP national conference. He has also created an official memorial to Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Tokyo design studio nendo responds to the work of M. C. Escher.
Sean Fennessy
There is nothing to prepare us for the shock to the senses in the National Gallery of Victoria’s latest exhibition combining the works of M. C. Escher with Japanese design firm nendo.
Forty-five years after his death, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has mounted a major exhibition of Tony Tuckson, focussing on his intensely personal Abstract Expressionist works
Kathleen Petyarre looking across Atnangker country, Northern Territory, December 2000.
Photograph Ian North; courtesy Wakefield Press
A new exhibition pairs paintings by Indigenous Australian artists with microscopic images captured by scientists. The parallels, as this gallery of pictures shows, are intriguing.
In the early 20th century, two families of collectors brought the best of modern French art to Russia. Many of their paintings - including works by Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne - can now be seen in Sydney.
Graeme Williams’s photograph he took in Thokoza township, near Johannesburg, in 1991. Police watch an ANC rally.
Graeme Williams
A new Science Gallery Melbourne exhibition offers a set of reflections, calculations and speculations that engage with ideas about the perfect body, mathematical precision, quantum physics and a post-human world.
Detail from Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1616. Her role playing predates by centuries the preoccupations of artists such as Cindy Sherman.
Wikimedia
Born into late-16th century Papal Rome, Gentileschi transcended the path of utter obscurity that was the lot of her female peers to become one of the most famous painters of the day.
Dorrit Black, The Bridge, 1930.
Oil on canvas on board,
60.0 x 81.0 cm.
Bequest of the artist, 1951, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Smith and Grace Crowley were some of many talented modernist women artists. But only with the advent of second wave feminism in the 1970s was their work properly acknowledged.
Throughout his life, Brett Whiteley made images of apes and monkeys. He found much in their character and physiognomy to identify with.
Sidney Nolan’s Steve Hart dressed as a girl 1947 from the Ned Kelly series 1946 – 1947 enamel paint on composition board 90.60 x 121.10 cm.
Gift of Sunday Reed 1977 National Gallery of Australia
As a bushranger in the Kelly gang, Steve Hart took to dressing as a woman and riding side-saddle to avoid detection. Sidney Nolan’s painting captures Hart’s adolescent cockiness, bravery, and foolhardy bluster.
Justine Varga,
Photogenic Drawing, 2017,
installation view, Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks.
Photo: Nick Kreisler Courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
The 2018 Tarrawarra Biennial explores the act of creation itself, dissolving boundaries between mind/body, physical/spiritual, and form/content. But the experience in the gallery is sometimes something of an anti-climax.
Trump Baby flies over Parliament Square in July during President Trump’s visit to the UK.
Andy Rain/EPA
Trump Baby is the latest in a long history of visual protests. But is this ‘cheap shot street theatre’ truly effective, or should we ask more of protest artists?
William Blake, Pity, 1795, Tate.
William Blake/Wikimedia Commons
The Romantics - including poets William Blake and William Wordsworth - lived in the 18th century, but their passionate ideas about imagination and nature are still influential today.
Detail from John Russell:
Almond tree in blossom c1887.
oil on gold ground on canvas on plywood 46.2 x 55.1 cm.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 (2004.216)
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne