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Visual Arts

Radical Utopia: An archeology of a creative city, curated by Harriet Edquist and Helen Stuckey, is a maximalist experience. Even the title itself is a little unwieldy.

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Sydney Modern

Art Gallery of New South Wales
by
April 2023, no. 452
Nearly three months have passed since the new building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) opened (3 December 2022). This summer, Sydney Modern, as the new North building by Japanese architectural firm SAANA is popularly known, has been Sydney’s main attraction and topic of conversation. ... (read more)

Imagine … the Wonder of Picture Books

State Library of New South Wales
by
03 February 2023
‘Just follow the ants,’ said a smiling guide at the Macquarie Street entrance to the State Library of New South Wales. I was led up the stairs by Tohby Riddle’s jaunty decals of those excellent insects to Imagine … the Wonder of Picture Books. ... (read more)

Peter Tyndall

Buxton Contemporary
by
31 January 2023
Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary, they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consistency over the past fifty years. ... (read more)
Before environmental psychologist Glenn Albrecht gave us the language of solastalgia, Mandy Martin painted Depaysement (2003). Martin chose a different word that also explores a sort of longing for a home that was no longer there, a safe place that predated the environmental destruction that rendered home unrecognisable. ... (read more)

Data Relations

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
by
20 December 2022
Is there now an elemental quality to data? Amazon and Meta have certainly demonstrated that data can be harnessed like a natural resource. Yet given that we, the users, shed data at an uncontrollable and unknowable rate, perhaps Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are not twenty-first century oil barons so much as the managers of a silkworm farm? Is all this data just simply information? Do we even have a right to claim it back? ... (read more)

Retainers of Anarchy

by
06 December 2022
Outlaw, the opening exhibition of the purpose-built new media gallery at Sydney Modern, (the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new extension) features Howie Tsui’s mesmerising multimedia installation, Retainers of Anarchy. On a 27.4-metre long, 3.85-metre high projection, which simulates the form of a scroll painting, hundreds of images hand-drawn in ink are animated into a kaleidoscope of supernatural severed heads, grotesque tortures, and characters familiar from wuxia (martial arts) novels and television series. These fantastical images jostle with motifs of everyday life in Hong Kong and iconic figures from the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and were later to erupt in the all-out rebellion in 2019 and its violent suppression by Xi Jinping’s government. ... (read more)

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium

Heide Museum of Modern Art
by
22 November 2022
‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves breathe, palpitating with a sense of their own inner vitality. ... (read more)

How rare an experience it is to be in an exhibition where you feel you are in the presence of the artist at work. It is as if you are watching the artist’s hand and eye moving swiftly in perfect unison as he outlines the object of his intense looking, repeating contours, making corrections, starting afresh, appearing to breathe life into his subjects, and thinking all the while.

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In 1968, at the time of the Field Exhibition, Regionalism in painting was not a respectable concept. Not one painting in that exhibition related in any way to place. Internationalism was paramount. Now fifteen years later, even such localised phenomena as the highly stylised spray-can graffiti of the New York subways has infiltrated easel painting and the art galleries of that city, once the capital of Internationalism.

In Australia, as styles flourished and died with rapidity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of important painters continued to work, not only with ‘recognisable shape’ as advocated by the Antipodeans, but with one particular form of it, the landscape.

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