13. JOHN COBURN
The major elements in Coburn’s work … are simplicity, order, colour, a concern with elemental subjects and a reduction to their symbolic essentials.1
White Bird c
14. BRETT WHITELEY
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
15. JEFFREY SMART
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 meanin
16. FRED WILLIAMS
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 i
17. TIM STORRIER
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 im
18. JEFFREY SMART
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<
19. ROSALIE GASCOIGNE
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. They don’t have to be clever, they don’t have to go to art school, they don’t have t
20. ROSALIE GASCOIGNE
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. They don’t have to be clever, they don’t have to go to art school, they don’t have t
21. INGE KING
Modernism is in many ways understood as the concurrent elements of aesthetics and technology. In art, and sculpture particularly, what is most common is the technique required to design and fabricate forms. Whether a product is more functional or indeed abstract does
22. CHARLES BLACKMAN
This tapestry-sized painting of a picnic outing harks back to Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe 1863 (Musée d'Orsay collection, Paris) and to deeply personal memories of Blackman’s fam