The religious experience should not be confused with the spiritual experience …¹

This beautifully compact composition of one of Justin O’Brien’s favourite biblical themes, gives pause to reflect on the long morphing evolution of the Blake Prize for Religious Art since it

As a young boy, Garry Shead had the good fortune to find himself under the wing of his uncle Maurice O’Shea (1897-1956), the great Hunter Valley winemaker. Shead’s vivid memory of his visits to the winery at Mount Pleasant in the early 1950s would inspire a series of works culminating in the

There is a peculiar melancholy about an empty space designed to accommodate a crowd. Anybody who has ever visited a resort town out of season can testify to the sense of desolation one feels in such places, in which shops, restaurants and hotels are geared to the needs of tourists and pleasu

Robert Indiana was a patriot, bound like us all to a time and a place. Born Robert Clark, the artist took his name from the midwestern state where he grew up and then spent decades wrestling with the contradictions, and complications, of the country around him. ‘I propose to be an American p

There is a cool uniformity to the sculptures of Clement Meadmore. They are as comfortably seen outdoors as they are within. Neither landscape nor interior seem to affect their appearance because they come to us readily formed. Our initial response is one of autonomy but as we move and take a

Lynn Chadwick’s career will always be remembered for one extraordinary moment, when he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale of 1956, and won the International Sculpture Prize. The Englishman was a surprising and controversial choice because it was widely believed the recipient sh

Albert Tucker is renowned for pictorially tough and emotionally charged depictions of Australian life. From his early T.S. Eliot-inspired motifs of the city as a dysfunctional wasteland, and the series ‘Images of Modern Evil’ and ‘Antipodean Heads,’ Tucker forged six decades of art under try

Charles Blackman held his first art exhibition at his Hawthorn studio in February 1952. The paintings depicted the uniformed schoolgirls he saw in the surrounding suburban streets. This beginning gave rise to major recognition of his now legendary Schoolgirls series. By the end of the follow

John Coburn’s monumental painting, Western Desert Dreaming, was created prior to a three-week expedition to northern and central Australia in July 1987, orchestrated by Vincent Serventy of the Australian Museum Society.  Landing in Darwin, the group travelled to Kakadu and the

At a certain point the lake turns all crimson coloured. It becomes too salty. There’s millions of fish just lying on the edge, dead pelicans … There it is and there it isn’t.¹

Edge of the Void 2009 shows the acclaimed Australian artist John Olsen at his erudite