In the summer of 2020, almost eleven years after her death at the age of eighty-eight, Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery paid homage to Margaret Olley in an exhibition called Margaret’s Gift.¹ The show comprised sixty-five works of art that Olley had donated to Australian publi

Painted in 1959, The Earthquake represents an important transitional phase for Jeffrey Smart. Author Barry Pearce cited this period between 1955 and 1961 as the moment when Smart began to refine himself as the painter now widely recognised.¹ Four solo exhibitions at Macqu

Your art has to come out of your daily life. I really believe that if anyone is born an artist they’ve only got to look at what’s around their feet and what’s available to them. The don’t have to be clever, they don’t have to go to art school, they don’t have to g

Your art has to come out of your daily life. I really believe that if anyone is born an artist they’ve only got to look at what’s around their feet and what’s available to them. The don’t have to be clever, they don’t have to go to art school, they don’t have to g

There is cool uniformity and geometric logic to the sculptures of Clement Meadmore. They resonate with architecture as they do with the viewer. It is in relation to their scale that we acknowledge them. Recognition is at once a gestalt; we consider the whole sculpture, but as we move about o

Tim Maguire first came to international prominence during the mid-1990s, when figurative painting was reassessed and revitalised in the postmodern era. His sumptuous, large-scale paintings of flowers and fruit simultaneously reprised and subverted artistic tradition. Maguire re-presented the

The work of Dale Frank is difficult to place in any one category, as it is as much a performance as it is painting. Frank’s early practice involved performance-based work; a notable example of this took place in Italy in the late 1970s, where viewers entering the gallery were presented with

In FTW (after Sam ‘Bull’ Hall) 2006, 27 painted parrots are framed or ‘caged’ within the letters F, T and W, an abbreviation of the nihilistic expression ‘Fuck the world’, commonly tattooed on the necks and inside the lips of prison inmates. The brilliance of the bird’s plumage dimi

The myth of Venus and Adonis is widely known through numerous sources. Rupert Bunny, having left Australia in 1884 for Europe, would have encountered the story through famous paintings to be seen in London by Titian (1488/90-1576), who painted several versions, as well as various treatments

Louis Buvelot, a Swiss-born émigré and artist, significantly enhanced his reputation as an important Australian artist during the 1860s and 1870s. By 1870, the year in which Emu Creek, Landscape near Terrinallum, Victoria c1870 was probably painted, Buvelot was being praised in the