A bizarre one-off exhibition in Moscow was recently announced to celebrate Vladimir Putin’s birthday. An anonymous group of artists contributed paintings depicting the president as the Greek hero Heracles…
One of the works on show at Manifesta 10: Francis Alÿs, Study for the Lada “Kopeika” Project. Brussels—St. Petersburg, 2014. (Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery. Commissioned by MANIFESTA 10, St. Petersburg. With the support of the Flemish authorities. Installation view MANIFESTA 10, General Staff Building, State Hermitage Museum.)
Manifesta
Manifesta is a nomadic European biennial exhibition of contemporary art that sets up camp in a different European city every two years. In 2012, Manifesta 9 was held in Limburg, Belgium, and considered…
Banksy is back. Back in the heart of Blighty (deepest Essex to be precise), spraying his musings on our walls. Cue the (now) habitual headlines and opinions. Cue the hysteria. This time, however, things…
This year’s 272 submissions guaranteed a tough selection process for the judges.
Photographer Jessica Wyld
Last Thursday, Melbourne artist Gosia Wlodarczak won the 2014 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award with her work Process Capsule Situations Sofitel (below). Over the 39 years that the award has been exhibited…
Ciara Phillips, Things Shared, 2014.
Tate Photography
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…
The hidden Curiosity Cabinets of European racism.
Ada Nieuwendijk
Exhibit B was a live performance staged by non-professional black actors that has been touring around Europe. These actors were “displayed” in a series of 13 “tableaux vivants” that recall the troubling…
Minouk Lim’s Navigation ID is an extraordinary example of community engaged public art.
Gwangju Biennale/ Stefan Altenburger
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…
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…
At Royal Holloway College at the University of London, Edwin Landseer’s picture “Man Proposes, God Disposes” (1864) is covered by a Union Flag every year during exams. Not because of any fears of cheating…
David McDairmid’s exuberant artworks help us understand the changing face of HIV/AIDS art.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
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…
Thinking does not need machines.
Robert Couse-Baker
Some computer scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey have written a computer programme that finds connections between paintings and can even discover influences between artists, they claim. This…
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
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…
How do artists from refugee communities gain access to the mainstream art world?
Newtown grafitti
Art practice occurs within a range of art circles: avant-garde, amateur, contemporary, political, commercial, mainstream or underground. It all depends on what media you use, your stylistic preference…
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
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
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…
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…
In Buenos Aires, a mural commemorates the bombing in July 1994 of the AMIA Jewish Community Centre. The black wall bears the image of a majestic tortoise. Lady Justice perches atop, her white drapery tracing…
Tim Maguire’s portrait of Cate Blanchett is one of the finalists for this year’s Archibald Prize.
AGNSW
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…
Art exhibitions that celebrate revolutions are hardly few and far between. After all, a revolution is a very sexy thing, and a surefire way to sell tickets. But those planning to visit the Barbican’s Digital…
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
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…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne