The ambitiously named exhibition, The National: New Australian Art, lives up to its title as a visual examination of Australia in an age of uncertainty.
Peta Clancy, Undercurrent 1, from the series Undercurrent, 2018-19, inkjet pigment print, W120 x H85cm each image approx.
Courtesy the artist
There is a long history of cultural silence on the frontier wars that characterised Australia’s colonisation. Peta Clancy’s exhibition invites us to see this history in the Victorian landscape.
Installation view: Quilty featuring Pancreatitis (Kenny), The Last Supper (Bottom Feeder) and Farewell virginity by Ben Quilty, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2019.
Photo: Grant Handcock.
Ben Quilty is the next big thing in Australian art. Will he be allowed - and will he allow himself - to explore and find his true potential as an artist?
The first major loan to Australia from a repository of canonical art works of Chinese culture deserves to be seen by all those interested in Chinese art.
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
Infrared and visible light satellite data is recoloured to produce striking images of Australia.
Grayson Cooke
Through his art and his travels, 19th-century French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix sought to understand the chaos of an era he called ‘the century of unbelievable things.’
Patricia Piccinini,
Kindred 2017, Silicone, fibreglass, hair, Ed. 1 of 3, 103 x 95 x 128cm.
Courtesy the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Natasha Harth, QAGOMA.
Part human, part animal, Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures are uncannily familiar, yet alarmingly other. A major new exhibition creates a parallel universe in which viewers can encounter her work.
The adaptable form of pleated and folded textiles provides a real world view of the mathematical field of topology.
Kate Scardifield
Art can help us explore and understand some of the more abstract ideas in maths - such a topology.
Detail from Gerhard Richter’s Reader (804), 1994 Oil on canvas.
72 x 102cm.
Collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA Purchase through the gifts of Mimi and Peter Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab, and the Accessions Committee Fund: Barbara and Gerson Bakar, Collectors Forum, Evelyn D. Haas, Elaine McKeon, Byron R. Meye
Gerhard Richter - one of the giants of post-war German art - is elusive, enigmatic and seemingly impossible to pin down. The first retrospective exhibition of his work in Australia is a brilliant and challenging event.
Paul Uhlmann, Batavia 4th June 1629 (night of my sickness), 2017, oil on canvas (detail, one of three panels).
Courtesy of the artist
The shipwreck of the Batavia and subsequent murders of 115 men, women and children have inspired many retellings. A new exhibition combines art and science to find new angles on an old tale.
Detail from NigeI Milsom (Australia, 1975–), Judo House Part 6 (The White Bird), 2014–15 oil on linen, 230 x 194 cm.
Reproduced courtesy of the artist and yuill|crowley, Sydney. Photo: Art Gallery of New South Wales
The Ecstasy of St Teresa is the point of departure for a new exhibition examining ecstasy in all its guises, from the sexual to the spiritual to the banal.
A new exhibition features more than 50 works by Fred Williams, centred on the You Yangs peaks, west of Melbourne. They illuminate a breakthrough moment in Australian art.
Contemporary artists from Judy Chicago to Stelarc have made art from blood. And an exhibition at Melbourne’s new Science Gallery addresses our ambivalent attitudes to this life-giving fluid.
A major exhibition of Jenny Watson’s work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art spans 40 years in the creative life of a rule-breaking Australian artist.
Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
Margaret Dodd’s Bridal Holden, 1977, ceramic sculpture, 24 x 42 x 20 cm.
Clay Glen. Courtesy The Cross Art Projects.
When the General Motors Holden factory closes at Elizabeth in October, an Australian icon will no longer be made here. But the Holden has been remade through art.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne