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-...
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Art Reviews
By Timothy Abdallah BA
21 Oct 2020
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.1Perfumed Garden was exhibited at Australian Galleries in June of that year and...
By Anonymous
21 Oct 2020
A contemporary of Brett Whiteley (1939-1992), Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) and John Olsen (born 1928), Michael Johnson occupies a vital position within the history of abstract painting in Australia. Born in Sydney, Johnson attended the Julian Ashton Art School followed by The National Art School...
By Anonymous
21 Oct 2020
In 1997, Imants Tillers made the impulsive, ‘not completely conscious and considered choice’ to move with his family from Sydney to Cooma, a small town in south-eastern New South Wales.1 This fundamental shift from the urban to regional offered rich new topography to probe the artist’...
By Asta Cameron
21 Oct 2020
Alongside art, Robert Dickerson’s enduring passion was undoubtedly horse racing. The two go hand in hand throughout his oeuvre, with horses, jockeys and punters among his most sought after subjects. Remarkably, his career as a full-time artist owes its inception to a wager on a horse: in 1957 he...
By Asta Cameron
21 Oct 2020
Born in rural Queensland in 1919, Hugh Sawrey was the son of a shearers’ cook and teamster, who died when Sawrey was just three years of age. At fifteen, he left school to support his widowed mother during the Great Depression, working as a drover and shearer throughout Queensland, the Northern...
By David Thomas
10 Jun 2020
Dated on its stylistic similarity to Falls Bridge, Melbourne 1882 in the National Gallery of Victoria, Cows Crossing McCauley Creek, Looking towards Melbourne c1882 provides a striking example of Frederick McCubbin’s early mastery of the melancholic moment in his narrative paintings.
By Timothy Abdallah BA
10 Jun 2020
A letter written to his friend and fellow artist Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961) in 1936 by Arthur Streeton conveys something of the artist’s mood and outlook after a lifetime as a central figure of Australia’s art world:
I don’t...
By Gavin Fry
10 Jun 2020
At the start of the third decade of the 21st century many Australians are feeling destabilised and concerned about their lives, both in the immediate and longer term. The current conditions help put...
By Caroline Jones BA, MA (Art Admin.)
10 Jun 2020
Although Garry Shead could be broadly described as a republican and his Royal Suite paintings promptly entered the Australian republican debate of the late 1990s, this was not the primary intention of the series. It had been a long time in the making, in fact about...
