…‘I have always found paradox and contradiction to hold a lot of truth and comfort for me.’
Del Kathryn Barton1
The award-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton is now such a force in contemporary Australian art that she could almost create her own weathe
Throughout his extraordinary career, Tim Storrier’s most memorable and distinctive motif has unquestionably been that of fire. Fire’s strength as a symbol is drawn in part from its ability to hold dual, if not contradictory, meanings. As we have seen during the horrific bushfires of last Sum
Over the last sixty years, John Olsen’s art has become synonymous with the unruly beauty of the Australian landscape. Embracing both figuration and abstraction, Olsen’s highly lyrical paintings are instantly recognisable, merging land, sky and water into a vivid sensation borne from a
Peter Booth is one of Australia’s most prominent and exciting artists of the late twentieth century. When the National Gallery of Victoria exhibited the retrospective Peter Booth: Human/Nature in 2003, the then deputy director, Frances Lindsay, stated that Booth had achieved ‘a cent
‘I have always looked forward to my first visit to this country, but now there is the added satisfaction for me that I am able to meet my Australian people as their Queen … I am proud indeed to be at the head of a nation that has achieved so much. Standing at last on Australian soil, o
One can imagine Sir Sidney Nolan, late in his career, reflecting with a wry smile and a sense of wonder as to how he had achieved the career and recognition sought by so many, but achieved by so few. The most famous, decorated and esteemed Australian artist of the century, comfortably enscon
In this painting Arthur Boyd introduces one of his most potent archetypes into the still, sparse space of a Wimmera landscape.
Boyd began painting the Wimmera district in western Victoria some two decades earlier, first visiting in the summer of 1948-49. Known for its wheatfie
Arguably the two greatest Australian painters of the second half of the twentieth century are united in this work by Sidney Nolan, in which he depicts fellow artist and lifelong friend Arthur Boyd (1920-1999).
Arthur Boyd at Fitzroy Falls was selected as a finalist fo
Bruce Armstrong is one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors: his large-scale public works of art dominate Melbourne’s cityscape. Armstrong’s best-known work would undoubtedly be Bunjil, the seven-storey high, 25-tonne eagle that towers over the Docklands precinct. This much-
John Coburn was 51 when he painted Perfumed Garden in 1976. Coburn was enjoying professional success and was, according to a critic at the time, at the height of his powers as a painter.1 Perfumed Garden was exhibited at Australian Galleries in June of that year