Art Reviews

Bundeena is a picture-perfect paradise nestled deep within the Royal National Park on the outskirts of southern Sydney. The township is neatly condensed to what appears to be a single street that hugs the shores of Hordens Beach. The pace is slow, and amidst silver…

Sidney Nolan is well known for depictions of the history and mythology of Australian life through an extended series of explorers such as Burke and Wills, Leichhardt, and Shackleton, and the bushranger Ned Kelly. Gallipoli, the famously ill…

James Gleeson has the well-deserved mantle of Australia’s foremost exponent of Surrealism. His practice commenced in the 1930s with Salvador Dali-inspired paintings and quickly evolved into his own unique style. This painting from the estate of Eva Breuer is a…

Landscape with Camel (Burke and Wills) 1966 marks the beginning-of-the-end for the perilous Burke and Wills inland expedition of 1860-61. The Victoria Exploring Expedition was a party of nineteen men led by…

I think one of the hardest things for a painter is to paint real life, to paint real experiences, real sensations that come to you and not sensations that come to you through other people’s art … My farm constructions were my own invention, and a direct response to my…

While Tim Maguire’s practice is mostly identified with the still-life genre, he claims no particular allegiance to it, crossing with equal ease to representations of landscape and abstraction. These apparently disparate bodies of work are in fact related both conceptually…

By the time Tim Maguire’s signature flower paintings were in full flow in the early 1990s, as in this luminous painting Untitled 94 1994, he was well-versed in historical and contemporary art through first-hand museum visits during repeated residencies and travels…

In the build up to Cornelia Parker’s recent 2022 retrospective at Tate Britain, the gallery praised her as ‘one of Britain’s best loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists’.¹ Her list of accomplishments is impressive and includes a commission piece for the…

To visit the home and studio of Cressida Campbell is a great privilege. The sound of water trickles in the background as the cool air of the studio mixes with the humid February heat. The space feels like organised chaos. Hundreds of contorting watercolour tubes sit atop…

Sleepless (Kenny) 2018 combines many of Ben Quilty’s characteristic themes and visual motifs. Portraiture is at the heart of his practice and having won the Archibald Prize in 2011 for his portrait of Margaret Olley (1923-2011), Quilty went on to produce…