Papunya has now achieved mythic status in the country’s cultural psyche for its place in the history of the Western Desert Art Movement, eclipsing its earlier symbolic place in the annals of white exploration of the interior; that of being the nearest town to the Australian ‘continental...
Slide Show
Art Reviews
By Jane Raffan
27 Feb 2019
Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus has been described as ‘a cultural provocateur who believed that there was no distinction between the political and the beautiful.’1
Philosophical thinking offers a useful key to unlock this statement. Australian academic Robin Ferrell has...
By Ken Wach
27 Feb 2019
There is always a hidden visual power in Jeffrey Smart’s paintings. His paintings are never simple scenes that are simply rendered – always there is an organising principle. Behind the visible scene there is the invisible mind that orders. Smart’s paintings are never the record of a scene but...
By Ken Wach
27 Feb 2019
Brett Whiteley’s tour de force painting The Paddock - Late Afternoon of 1979 shows the then forty-year old Sydney artist at his most colouristically luminous – only rarely did he ever attain, even in part, the suffused effects of this optically striking painting.
This...
By Timothy Abdallah BA
27 Feb 2019
Born in Holland in 1877, Cornelius Theodorus Maria (Kees) van Dongen, began his career as a student at the Rotterdam Academy at the age of fifteen. As a young man he was also engaged in radical politics and earned some extra money as a political cartoonist and illustrator. In fact until 1908 the...
By Ken Wach
27 Feb 2019
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.
Perhaps, this was why he was so keenly admired for the quality of his art and so respected for the deep...
By Ken Wach
27 Feb 2019
Most people in Australia know Lloyd Rees’s paintings. Most in Sydney value them highly. This justifiably high regard has a long history. In fairness, it must be admitted that at times such great regard has waxed and waned and that, in the minds of some, there were periods when Rees’s reputation...
By Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM FAHA
27 Feb 2019
In Garry Shead’s oeuvre, the 1990s was a golden period for his art. It was a time when he attained national recognition with his D.H Lawrence series and then The Royal Suite. In 1993 he was awarded the Archibald Prize for his amazingly expressionistic portrait of Tom Thompson...
By Anonymous
27 Feb 2019
…the painting simultaneously does so many different things, exquisitely orchestrated to the finest pitch, that you can feel exhilarated, drunk, as you stand before it. You do feel intoxicated, or at least pleasurably seasick, because you are immediately plunged into...
By Marguerite Brown MA - Art Curatorship
27 Feb 2019
Tim Maguire is well known for his large-scale paintings that depict cropped, macro views of flowers and plant-life. This UK based Australian born artist is credited for taking the established genre of still-life painting in a contemporary direction – one that considers the realm of digital image...
