Art Guide Australia

A whats-on guide to the visual arts in Australia

Art Guide Australia2 min read
A Note From the Editor
The images created by Tasmania-based artist Pat Brassington have always felt to me like the underside of the Australian art psyche, so readily lending themselves to psychoanalytic, surrealist and feminist readings. It’s a privilege to have these work
Art Guide Australia1 min read
Art Guide Australia
EDITOR–IN–CHIEF AND PODCAST PRODUCER Tiarney Miekus ASSISTANT EDITOR Sally Gearon WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR Minna Gilligan GRAPHIC DESIGNER Jack Loel PRODUCTION AND BOOKSTORE MANAGER Caitlin Aloisio Shearer CONTRIBUTORS ISSUE #149 Steve Dow, B
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Issue 149 Contributors
STEVE DOW is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer, whose profiles, essays, previews and reviews range across the visual arts, theatre, film and television for The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald, The A
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Geelong/Djilang
Geelong Gallery 18 May—28 July Despite working in different styles across painting and printmaking, renowned Australian artists Margaret Preston (1875—1963) and the contemporary Cressida Campbell each have an affinity for the Japanese ukiyo-e print.
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Brisbane/Meanjin
QAGOMA On now—18 August In 2014, Bruce Pascoe published Dark Emu. The book sparked conversations about Indigenous Australia’s relationship with the land, and transformed “mainstream Australia’s imagination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders”,
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Darwin/Larrakia Country
Hunnah James Tactile Arts 10—25 May The paperbark tree is an Australian mainstay. Popular with native wildlife and resistant to drought, many grow throughout Darwin, where Hunnah James currently lives and works. “Paperbarks have this shedding that’s
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Melbourne/Naarm
Laure Prouvost Australian Centre for Contemporary Art On now—10 June With her hallmark absurdism, Laure Prouvost is a leading figure in contemporary art. She centres the female, drawing on her own experiences to meet the real with the ludicrous. In t
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Murrurundi
Stacey McCall Michael Reid Murrurundi 12—30 June Stacey McCall’s work celebrates the domestic. The Melbourne-based artist’s paintings depict everyday objects with a distinctly handmade touch; brush strokes are evident, as is a strong sense of home. “
Art Guide Australia1 min read
Hervey Bay/Butchulla Country
Matilda Davis Hervey Bay Regional Gallery 11 May—30 June Matilda Davis’s The White Man’s Web emerged out of the Badjala/Batjala artist’s memories of environmental destruction in the vicinity of her coastal home during childhood and adolescence. “I fi
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Sydney/Eora
DRAW Space 2—26 May Layering, smudging, frottage; the language of drawing is iterative, mutable. It is a language that imagines the human hand as it makes uncertain contact towards yet-known forms. As American artist Amy Sillman reminds us, drawing i
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Adelaide/Kaurna Country
Nat Penney Newmarch Gallery 14 June—13 July Trained in timber furniture making and metal fabrication, Adelaide-based artist Nat Penney centres her professional practice around creating functional objects with purpose. Taking a looser and more subject
Art Guide Australia2 min read
Gold Coast/Yugambeh
HOTA Gallery On now—4 August The beachside charm of the Gold Coast is getting the Renaissance treatment with the region’s major gallery, Home of the Arts (HOTA), exhibiting not “old master” paintings per se, but a series of multifaceted, immersive pr
Art Guide Australia1 min read
Melbourne/Naarm
Craft Victoria 11 May—22 June “There’s something about aluminium, there’s this allure. Even the name—to illuminate, it has that association with light and attraction,” says Eliza Tiernan, curator of Aluminium, an exhibition at Craft Victoria that ask
Art Guide Australia4 min read
Where We Live
Much like the process of a magpie collecting detritus to adorn its world, Kasia Töns deliberately threads together disparate discards of the day to create modular, soft, safe havens that defy expectations of dwellings as we know them. Currently house
Art Guide Australia4 min read
Status Anxiety
A sentence, for Jenny Holzer, isn’t about stating the obvious. It can be an arbiter of hidden meaning. It can declare unspoken rules. The legendary artist, who grew up in Ohio, is best known for Truisms, a sequence of maxims—money creates taste, abus
Art Guide Australia8 min read
Interview Pat Brassington
Skewed body parts; allusions to genitalia, sex and violence; tinges of the fleshiest pink; a girl with a lightbulb for a head. Since the 1980s Pat Brassington’s images have entranced the psyche of contemporary Australian art. The photo-media artist’s
Art Guide Australia4 min read
Studio Kez Hughes
One of my favourite painting techniques is “scumbling”, an onomatopoeic word that describes a dry brush method where the painter creates feathery motions, building moody colour graduations. This technique finds echoes in Kez Hughes’s process. She lay
Art Guide Australia5 min read
Creating In The Age Of The Anthropocene
Between ever-worsening news of climate change and environmental degradation, growing species extinction, and a fundamental lack of care for land and nature, fauna and flora—art still, somehow, goes on. Caught between hope, purpose, fatigue and anxiet
Art Guide Australia3 min read
Material Action
To make his 2012 video-artwork A World Undone, which is the earliest work in Nicholas Mangan’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), the artist needed a really high-speed camera. The video shows fine rock particles (dust, really)
Art Guide Australia4 min read
Talking Promises Jill Orr
When we speak, Orr’s current exhibition, The Promised Land Refigured, is opening at Linden New Art, revisiting an earlier series from 2012. Originally performed at sites of migrant arrival and colonial expansion at St Kilda and along the Yarra River,
Art Guide Australia3 min read
Everything In Between
The artist Jumaadi paints and draws on the tough hide from water buffalo once used to plough rice fields. His art, which depicts Javanese folk culture, also encompasses cloth canvas, laboriously stretched and sealed in a large pond of rice glue, hand
Art Guide Australia4 min read
All’s Pharaoh
There’s an enduring fascination with ancient Egypt. Perhaps it’s the imagery—there is a pictorial nature to the culture, through hieroglyphs and the adornment of objects. Or maybe it’s the abundance and quality of materials from the period—burying ob
Art Guide Australia4 min read
Beginnings and Endings
Growing up in Brisbane in the 1980s, I remember businessman Alan Bond and the America’s Cup sailing competition frequently mentioned in the nightly news—Bond was determined to win the race. In 1988, I received the Australian Bicentennial Medallion gi
Art Guide Australia41 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Victoria
www.acaearts.com.au Australasian Cultural Arts Exchange 82A Wellington Street, Collingwood, VIC 3066 [Map 3] 0406 711 378 Tue to Sun 10am–5pm. See our website for latest information. ACAE Gallery is a cultural venture presenting artworks and exhibiti
Art Guide Australia40 min read
A–Z Exhibitions New South Wales
www.314abercrombie.gallery 314 Abercrombie Street, Darlington, NSW 2008 [Map 14] 0404 146 738 See our website for latest information. This small, inviting, bright gallery nestled snugly in Darlington beside the Redfern area is the up-and-coming art p
Art Guide Australia20 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Queensland
www.aboveandbelowgallery.com.au Shop 12a, Port of Airlie, 33 Port Drive, Airlie Beach, QLD 4802 [Map 14] 0419 941 162 Wed to Sat 9am–4pm, Sun 9am–1pm. Focusing on the ocean as a canvas, from both above in the aerial sphere and below the waters surfac
Art Guide Australia7 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Australian Capital Territory
www.aarwungallery.com.au 11 Federation Square, Gold Creek, Nicholls, ACT 2913 [Map 16] 0499 107 887 Daily 10am–4.30pm and by appointment in the evening. See our website for latest information. En Plein Air – A Modern Impressionist Ken Knight www.arti
Art Guide Australia7 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Tasmania
www.bettgallery.com.au Level 1, 65 Murray Street, Hobart, TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 6511 Mon to Fri 10am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–4pm. Philip Wolfhagen Minor Falls, Major Lifts Kelly Austin Dermatologists hate her! Mish Meijers Monument Rosie Hastie www.cont
Art Guide Australia3 min read
A–Z Exhibitions South Australia
www.ace.gallery Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8211 7505 Tue to Sat 11am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 2024 Porter Street Commission – Lee Salomone www.agsa.sa.gov.au Kaurna Count
Art Guide Australia10 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Western Australia
www.artcollectivewa.com.au 2/565 Hay Street, Cathedral Square, Perth, WA 6000 [Map 19] 08 9325 7237 Wed to Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 12pm–4pm, or by appointment. Beyond the Lines Eveline Kotai Eveline Kotai continues her ongoing exploration of how patterns r
Art Guide Australia2 min read
A–Z Exhibitions Northern Territory
www.araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au 61 Larapinta Drive, Alice Springs, NT 0870 08 8951 1122 Open daily 10am–4pm. See our website for latest information. GROUNDSWELL To celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2024 the Araluen Arts Centre is presenting a major s

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