Helen Marten, this year’s winner, has revealed a sense of something progressive and pioneering.
Detail from Shenae & Jade, 2005, Petrina Hicks.
Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne and Michael Reid, Sydney
A new exhibition exploring the relationship between birds and humans is variously gaudy, delightful and disturbing. We sent two ecologists along to review the show.
Ahmed Cherkaoui (Morocco), Les Miroirs Rouges, 1980. Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation
Fake Cambodian sculptures have infiltrated the antiquities market, where they remain unacknowledged and their production continues unabated.
The mitotic spindle inside a living cell, magnified x 80,000, captured by biomedical animator Drew Berry.
Drew Barry/Morbis Artis: Diseases of the Arts
When art meets the biological sciences, living matter becomes the medium. From the chaotic beauty of smallpox to poems implanted in bacteria, Bio-art investigates the boundaries of life and death.
Veterans see something very different to the medals, uniforms and poppies of Remembrance Day.
FACT
A new exhibition at MONA, curated by scientists, explores the biological and evolutionary origins of art. The show is spectacular - but it offers an overwhelmingly male perspective.
The Art Gallery of NSW’s summer blockbuster sparkles with famous names, including Picasso, Matisse, Turner and Rodin. But for all of its trumpeting of risk and daring, it remains essentially a rather puritanical exercise.
Why is criticism so often associated with killjoy negativity? It can convey joy as well as discrimination.
Byron Barrett/flickr
With the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the rise of populist extremism, we must defend the teaching of anthropology. And in doing so, we might expand and rethink ideas of “the humanities”.
‘Posh white girls’ are unjustifiably taking the brunt of reports of the last art history A-level but casualties are all those the exam board had been moving to reach out to.
Changwon Sculpture Biennale casts a wide net, from a disconcerting jumble of plastic body parts to a break-dancing sculptor armed with an angle-grinder.
Commerce and Sea Power, William Lionel Wyllie, 1898.
Guildhall Art Gallery
Laying the first telegraphy cable under the Atlantic was the Victorians’ version of the Apollo mission – it caught the imagination of a generation.
Fifty years after the Maralinga atomic tests, an exhibition grapples with the pain and devastation left behind.
Karen Standke, Road to Maralinga II (detail). Supplied
The Maralinga atomic tests were devastating to life and land in Central Australia. Black Mist Burnt Country brings together dozens of artistic responses in a powerful, but somewhat incoherent memorial.
A yellow line becomes a blistering ray of sunlight in Summer in the You Beaut Country. John Olsen’s paintings, often described as ‘quintessentially Australian’, teem with life.
Elioth Gruner Spring Frost 1919: one of the paintings included in the gallery’s program.
Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of F G White 1939
A new study shows that looking at paintings can bring pleasure to people living with dementia, affecting their wellbeing even after the memory of the event has gone.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne