The birds are important. The budgies, mynas and cockatoos that populate Ben Quilty’s work are far more than just cutesy, faintly menacing characters.
Slide Show
Art Reviews
By Rodney James, B.A. (Hons.), M.A
03 Mar 2021
‘Nolan’s Antarctica is the anxious and apprehensive land; the paint is clogged, swirled, cluttered, the spirit troubled.’
Elwyn Lynn, September 1965
By Catherine Baxendale B Phil Hons
03 Mar 2021
John Perceval’s 1961 painting, Beach Studio, captures the jovial atmosphere of the Aspendale beach house owned by his friends and patrons, John and Sunday Reed.
By Corinna Cullen BA MA Art History and Curatorial Studies
03 Mar 2021
Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer chose Businessman Getting Ready for Work 2003 for a full-page illustration in their monograph on John Olsen, Journeys into the ‘You Beaut Country’. It appears alongside an excerpt from the artist’s diary praising the simple pleasure of a poached...
By Carla Dusevic BA Hons
03 Mar 2021
In 1983, Andy Warhol was commissioned to create several limited edition screenprints for the occasion of his upcoming travelling retrospective exhibition in Japan. After first making contact through Gaston Petit (born 1930), a Canadian priest and artist stationed in Tokyo, the brief for America’...
By Jane Raffan
03 Mar 2021
Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus has been described as a ‘provocateur who believed that there was no distinction between the political and the beautiful.’1 A self-declared ‘cultural mechanic’,2 Onus challenged cultural hegemonies with satire and humour in overt...
By Rodney James, B.A. (Hons.), M.A
03 Mar 2021
As one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, Tim Storrier has developed a body of work that is instantly recognisable and universally admired. His outback paintings evoke wondrous feelings of nature and of the Earth as an arena of mysterious rituals, ceremony and elemental...
By Ken Wach
03 Mar 2021
William Robinson was born in Brisbane and as a young man he showed considerable promise as a musician to the point that, in 1957, he was a State Finalist in the ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition, which led to a position playing piano for the Queensland Symphony...
By Tim Abdallah
03 Mar 2021
Sidney Nolan’s treatment of Ned Kelly is the best known group of paintings in Australian art. The series grew out of an interest that was deep and nuanced. Ned Kelly the Bushranger, the Legend and the Myth, have been more widely discussed than any other figure in Australian history. At the time...
By Ken Wach
03 Mar 2021
Some artists paint what they see; others what they feel. For the Melbourne-based artist John Brack it was different. For Brack, art was more in the manner of an intellectual act.
