This painting was first shown in 5AR: Artists and Architects, a collaborative group exhibition curated by Val Austin, at the University of Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery in June 1986. The stark monochrome palette references its origins in Elizabethan half-timbered architecture, and...
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Art Reviews
By Gavin Fry
27 Aug 2019
Albert Tucker was of a generation of Australians whose lives were constrained by the great international turmoils of the first half of the twentieth century. Born at the beginning of the First World War, his childhood was overshadowed by the communal loss of a nation that had lost sixty thousand...
By Gavin Fry
27 Aug 2019
The term ‘icon’ has become perhaps the most over-used, and abused, word in the contemporary lexicon, yet in many ways it is hard not to describe Rick Amor’s The Waiter as an iconic work in the artist’s long career. It stands near the mid point, twenty-seven years after his graduation...
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
The soft luminosity and the free spill of earthy tones in Fred Williams’s early work, Purple Landscape of 1958, lead the viewer’s eye to an upper register of loosely applied and scumbled paint that seems to “hang” over the whole scene. The painting has a visual power that is arresting...
By Rodney James BA (Hons.), MA
27 Aug 2019
‘Living in the country everything moves – the seasons , the clouds, nothing is set. There are things behind you, all around you and you are in it.’ William Robinson
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
Jeffrey Smart was an extremely well-travelled artist. His many road trips as a passenger (he did not drive) provided him with the opportunity to scan urban and suburban landscapes looking for strange juxtapositions, unusual events and odd placements. Such metropolitan vignettes were collected by...
By Rodney James BA (Hons.), MA
27 Aug 2019
Room with Pink Chair 1998 is a late work by Howard Arkley produced at the peak of his career. With exhibitions in Los Angeles and Venice just around the corner and major commissions planned for the National Gallery of Victoria and National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Arkley was...
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
Arthur Boyd never wore a belt because he believed that it would restrict his circulation. Even such a small detail says something about his essential difference from others. His Christian Science upbringing was fundamental and it instilled in him a strong work ethic and a self-belief that...
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
Sidney Nolan is universally regarded as Australia’s foremost modernist artist. Famed for his prodigious output in a career that spanned over five decades, there is no question that his most celebrated creation remains his paintings on the subject of Australia’s most notorious bushranger Ned...
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
Smart’s was an observational aesthetic. He presented ‘freeze frame’ mental snapshots captured while scanning the urban environment. These images, unusual events and odd placements were then carefully arranged into compositions in his studio. Smart’s compositions are always arresting and...
