This year’s winning Archibald Prize portrait, Moby Dickens by Blak Douglas, encapsulates the justifiable rage felt by people living in flooded Bundjalung country
Soda_Jerk TERROR NULLIUS, 2018.
digital video/duration:54 minutes
Courtesy the artists
Over the past half a century, Australian women’s art has gone from the margins to the mainstream. A new book mapping this story is a flawed, colourful kaleidoscope.
Although they work in different genres, a similar sense of restraint imbues the work of each.
Installation view of Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala from 17 December 2021 to 25 April 2022 at NGV.
International, Melbourne.
Photo: Tom Ross
Bark painting in Yirrkala is a tradition of antiquity – but it is constantly reinvented, as this stunning exhibition of contemporary women’s work attests.
Jeffrey Smart, Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum.
1994–95 Tuscany, Italy. Oil on canvas 67 x 110 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Bequest of Ian Whalland 1997. 85.1997
Jeffrey Smart is admired for his carefully structured paintings of Tuscany and Rome. This National Gallery of Australia’s centenary celebration of his birth takes the viewer back to Adelaide.
Yuma Taru.
The spiral of life – the tongue of the cloth
(yan pal ana hmali) – a mutual dialogue 2021
Ramie suspended from metal threads / 500 x 250cm (diam.); installed dimensions variable / Commissioned for APT10
Courtesy: The artist and Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre
Margel Hinder was responsible for some of Australia’s most significant public sculptures in the 1960s and 70s. A major exhibition now examines the totality of her career.
Dušan Marek, born Bítouchov, Czechoslovakia 1926, died Adelaide 1993. Analysis of Substance, 1952, Kings Cross, Sydney. Oil on canvas, 36.5 x 88.2 cm.
Purchased with the assistance of James Agapitos OAM and Ray Wilson OAM 2007, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Australian surrealism has long been understood as if it was imported from Paris. This new exhibition places two Czech-Australian émigrés at the heart of the movement.
Peter Wegner’s Guy Warren in his 100th Year, winner of the 2021 Archibald Prize.
AGNSW/Peter Wegner/Photo Jenni Carter
In its centenary year, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales could not resist the symbolism of awarding the Archibald Prize to Peter Werner’s portrait of the 100 year old Guy Warren.
It’s 100 years since the Art Gallery of NSW first held the Archibald Prize. Though loathed by some critics, it is an annual snapshot of the kind of society we are, and who our heroes might be.
Marikit Santiago’s.
Filipiniana (self-portrait in collaboration with Maella Santiago Pearl)
AGNSW/Marikit Santiago
With travel bans and conservative limits on theatre capacities, this year’s Ten Days is a smaller affair than usual, placing community arts at its heart.
Clarice Beckett, Australia, 1887 - 1935, The red sunshade, 1932, Melbourne, oil on board; Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
AGSA
Known for her soft capturing of tonal shifts and poignant moments, painter Clarice Beckett’s legacy was almost lost to time and decay. Now her work is being celebrated in a major exhibition.
For over 60 years, Daniel Thomas has shaped and extended our understanding of Australian art. Sometimes cheeky, always erudite, Thomas’s writings are collected in a new book.
Arthur Streeton The vanishing forest 1934, oil on canvas, 122.5 x 122.5 cm.
On loan to the Art Gallery of Ballarat from the Estate of Margery Pierce
A major new exhibition presents a nuanced view of Arthur Streeton who, in his lifetime, was praised as being the artist ‘who has shown us our land as no one else has done’.
Danie Mellor’s A Time of World’s Making (2019) detail.
Danie Mellor/AGNSW
Works by eight artists in the Dobell Drawing Biennial draw on dreams, history and reality. But drawing has escaped the gallery and will scribe on despite less government support for the arts.
Vincent Namatjira’s Stand strong for who you are, acrylic on linen, 152 x 198 cm.
Photo: AGNSW/Mim Stirling
For the first time in its 99 year-history, the Archibald Prize has been won by an Indigenous painter. The Wynne and Sulman Prize winners also signal a time of change.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne