Art Reviews

Columbines 1962 dates from a critical phase of Margaret Olley’s career, when she first achieved recognition on a national scale.  In 1962, Olley was heralded by the Courier-Mail as Australia’s ‘top woman painter’ following a sell-out show at…

Now that Cressida Campbell has so completely emerged and has achieved her place as one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, it would be impossible to conceive of another painter so involved with the lived environment. She is both painter and…

I think the pleasure of painting is the manipulation of this solid body - that it's pushed around into a kind of structure - the thickness of paint or impasto, not for its own sake but the physical pleasure…

It’s a rare occurrence in Jeffrey Smart’s work that we find a figure in motion – let alone the strenuous, spectacular motion of a gymnast. Smart built his art on stillness, the kind of stillness found in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, as celebrated in monographs…

The major elements in Coburn’s work … are simplicity, order, colour, a concern with elemental subjects and a reduction to their symbolic essentials.¹

To comb through the letters of Brett Whiteley is to encounter a spirited commentary on politics, relationships and many of the major developments that have gripped the art world from the Renaissance to the present day. The topics shift in turn with the currents of…

Few paintings better exemplify Jeffrey Smart’s search for beauty in the everyday than this study of two petrol bowsers set against a bare concrete wall. As the title suggests, Study for The Petrol Station holds no promise of hidden depths or secret meanings.…

In 1968 there was a revolutionary uprising in Paris, the Russian tanks rolled into Prague, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and the National Gallery of Victoria opened its new building on St Kilda Road. It may sound like we had a quiet time of it,…

Tim Storrier’s painting is born from his ability to isolate a moment in time and infuse it with intense detail. Storrier paints expansive and pared-back scenes of the Australian landscape that he executes with painstaking precision. His compositions sing with…

It would be possible to do an entire exhibition of paintings by Jeffrey Smart featuring buses and trucks. Yet where the back of a truck usually appears as a bold geometric shape – a red square on grey asphalt, the buses are treated more playfully. In The Traveller…