CYRUS TANG and GUAN WEI will have work in the group exhibition Closing the Distance, curated by Sophia Cai, at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre.
The exhibition brings together twelve Australian and international artists to explore contemporary issues of migration, place and the Chinese diaspora within Australia and beyond.
Exhibition dates are 11 February to 30 April 2017.
Guan Wei, Land of the Dreaming No. 5, 2014, ceramic, 41 x 30cm.
Virgin Australia Voyeur, December 2016, No. 185, p 109.
Guan Wei is featured in the latest issue of Virgin Australia's in-flight magazine Voyeur.
The magazine asked four influential creatives to talk about the destinations that have shaped their work. GUAN WEI's destination of choice was Coastal Australia.
"My work often looks at land borders and themes of migration, so I have found three elements of the Australian landscape — the sea, beach and islands — very meaningful. I'm drawn to the power of the Australian landscape and its borders in ancient terms as well as in terms of Indigenous and contemporary issues. There's an extraordinary paradox between freedom and closed borders."
You can download issue No.185, featuring the article here.
ROBERT OWEN APPOINTED CURATORIAL ADVISOR FOR UNIVERSITY SQUARE
PUBLIC ART MELBOURNE
Congratulations to Robert Owen who has been appointed to lead the City of Melbourne's reimagining of University Square in Carlton.
Following a national open call, Owen was appointed as the Public Art Curatorial Adviser for the $8.8 million redevelopment, which commences in 2017. His creative vision for the project references the site’s rich and diverse associations, the process of change and the transformative journey of education.
Webb Bridge, 2003. Artist: Robert Owen, in collaboration with architects Denton Corker Marshall Pty Ltd. For the Docklands Authority, Melbourne, Australia, Photography: John Gollings.
Peter Daverington, Arcadia (still), 2012, high definition single channel blue-ray video, 9mins.
PETER DAVERINGTON is presenting a solo exhibition at the Minhang Mass Art Centre in Shanghai.
Before the Apocalypse opens 7 December 2017.
Robert Owen, Pink & Grey Wall, 1978, drymounted inkjet print, 72 x 47 cm.
ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present In the White Square, a group exhibition exploring themes of new abstraction curated by Laura Lantieri. An opening reception will be held on Saturday 10 December, 4-6pm.
Showcasing the work of five Australian contemporary artists well-known for their use of abstraction as a primary visual language, In the White Square features Robert Owen, Jacky Redgate and Lydia Wegner, alongside invited artists Caleb Shea and Gemma Smith. Across a dynamic mix of sculpture and photo- based media, the artists in this exhibition are drawn together by a shared emphasis on formal concerns such as colour, form, space, light, optics and geometry.
The exhibition draws its title from two of the 20th century’s great pioneers of abstract art – Vasily Kandinsky’s In the Black Square (1923), and Kasimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) – while referring obliquely to the ‘white cube’ exhibition space that came to rise in the last century. Situated in the formerly industrial, oblong ‘white cube’ of ARC ONE Gallery, In the White Square also considers the ways in which these artists employ abstraction in the context of a broader historical trajectory.
Variously touching on constructivism, minimalism, and hard-edge painting among other influences, the works blend a pared minimal aesthetic with a more idiosyncratic and playful touch. They invite the viewer to decipher lines, contours, surface textures and reflections in an almost puzzle-solving process, while blocks of colour activate spaces and pulse, oscillating between real and inferred depths of field. Challenging our understanding of what we see and what we know through an eye-popping agenda of geometry, colour and form, the artists of In the White Square collectively interrogate the very act of viewing.
Please note ARC ONE Gallery will be closed from 18 December 2016 and reopen 24 January 2017.
Gemma Smith is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, & Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales recently announced their 2017 program. This includes a major exhibition showcasing the work of PAT BRASSINGTON.
Australian photo-media artist Pat Brassington has an incisive ability to infuse the familiar with the fantastic. Her work explores the domestic uncanny, psychoanalysis and bodily distortion, using a surrealist aesthetic charged with a feminist edge.
This exhibition from the Gallery’s collection traces her interest in the body as a fluid and flexible form. Featuring work from the 1990s alongside more recent work, it considers the haunting presence of the body in Brassington’s photographs and her particular use of visceral and allegorical imagery.
The exhibition, the body electric, will run from 19 August 2017 – 11 February 2018.
Find out more here.
Pat Brassington, Candie, 2013, pigment print, 60 x 44cm.
We are pleased to announce that MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO has been included in the book L’ABC…Z des Héroïnes Figures féminines du monde by Marilyn Degrenne. The book brings together outstanding women’s profiles from around the world.
For more information visit this link.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Museum of Copulatory Organs.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso is presenting one of her vitrines of the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO) in the latest group show at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
MoCO’s collection consists of dozens of anatomically accurate models of what is dubbed by scientists as ‘genitalic extravagance’ among invertebrates. MoCO Museum is part an ongoing research project by Cardoso.
The exhibition Out of Hand: Materialising the Digital continues through to 25 June 2017.
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO's public commission, Sandstone Pollen, has been unveiled in the new Darling Harbour precinct.
This major public artwork – a series of unique sandstone pollen sculptures – was inspired by the diversity of pollen microfossils that were found in Darling Harbour, and were later identified by palynionologist Mike Macphail.
Her ‘pollen morphologies’, combining scientific research and beautiful, complex forms, can be found along the Boulevard Walk, invoking conversation about the story of evolution, of sexual reproduction and the generation of formal beauty.
Cardoso’s work synthesises thought about the story of place and life as it was and as it is at Darling Harbour and Cockle Bay.
Read the artist proposal here.
Peter Daverington, Learn From the Classics – But Please Don’t Destroy Them, 2015, oil, enamel and gesso on canvas, 198 x 152cm.
Peter Daverington has been listed as the 5th most exciting street artist working today by artnet News.
An Australian-born artist now based in Beacon, New York, Peter Daverington took up street art at the tender age of 11. As an adult, he’s developed a style all his own, juxtaposing stylized graffiti lettering with superbly-modeled figures that appear to have stepped out of a Renaissance-era canvas.
Read the entire article here.
Andrew Frost talks to PETER DAVERINGTON about his latest exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery, Weltlandschaft, in a fantastic interview published today on The Art Life.
Read the interview here >
Peter Daverington, Akkadian Landscape, 2016, oil on canvas, 158 x 122 cm.
Nike Savvas is exhibiting in Quicksilver: 25 Years of Samstag Scholarships at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum, University of South Australia. The exhibition celebrates the 25th anniversary of Gordon Samstag's remarkable bequest, which led to establishment of the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships.
Quicksilver reflects on the impact of the Samstag Scholarships on the trajectory of Australian contemporary art. Pivotal works by six distinguished Samstag Scholars — including NIKE SAVVAS — highlights the exciting talent that the University of South Australia has had the pleasure of assisting over the last quarter century.
The exhibition runs from 14 October - 9 December 2016.
See this link for more information.
Image: Quicksilver: 25 Years of Samstag Scholarships, featuring work by Nike Savvas, 2016, installation detail, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photograph by Sam Noonan.
Janet Laurence is exhibiting in the 30th Session of OCEANIC VISIONS at the 6th Biennial of Anglet curated by Paul Ardenne. This anniversary session of VIDEO FOREVER has been selected by Barbara Polla and promotes the way in which contemporary artists work with the ocean as an essential part of our life, as a frontier to cross, as a temple concealing memories and myths.
The selection of video work will be screened on the 28th of October 2016.
For more information click here.
ANNE SCOTT WILSON will be exhibiting in a group show at RMIT Gallery, titled Morbis Artis: Diseases of the Arts. The exhibition explores the radical conjunction between the biomolecular and the artistic, and the thin doorway between life and death housed within discourses of disease.
17 November 2016 - 18 February 2017
Peter Daverington, Jacob's Tent, 2016, oil on linen, 122 x 92 cm.
New York-based Australian artist Peter Daverington returns to Melbourne this November with an exhibition of new paintings, titled Weltlandschaft. Opening drinks will be held on Thursday 10 November, 6-8pm.
A contemporary painter of rare technical distinction, Peter Daverington has garnered significant recognition for his unparalleled ability to mix pictorial styles and art genres. In his latest exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery, Daverington explores the landscape painting tradition of 16th century Northern Europe with a mélange of fantastical interjections. Against a backdrop of rolling valleys, cavernous skies and trees, seemingly- endless paths lead to covert horizons, rivers stream down floating geometric planes, and mountainous forms are peppered with candy-stripes, flaming tops and carnivalesque motifs. Moving away from linear perspective in favour of more isometric projections of space, Daverington creates captivating pictorial ‘maps’ that encourage the viewer to travel the canvas at free will.
The exhibition’s German title, Weltlandschaft, meaning ‘world landscape’, refers to a period in Netherlandish painting of imaginary panoramic landscapes depicted from encompassing, elevated viewpoints. Inspired by the work of Joachim Patinir and Hieronymous Bosch, Daverington fuses these compositional techniques with his own unique aesthetic to create truly contemporary and surreal interpretations of the genre. In these landscapes early Renaissance, geometric hard-edge painting and even 1980s videogame design find an unlikely harmony.
With several of the works’ titles referencing Sumerian mythology, Daverington seeks out points of connection across periods and cultures, and weaves a mythical narrative that reflects his own longstanding interest in ancient history, Mesopotamia and painting traditions beyond the West. In Weltlandschaft, Peter Daverington presents fantastic topologies of the imagination; he transforms us into armchair travellers, contemplating bygone and imagined vistas made mystic in a playful engagement of the unknown.
DANI MARTI has a solo exhibition at the University Gallery at the University of Newcastle entitled Still life in yellow, steel and mandarins. The aromatic installation explores the physical, psychological and emotional boundaries around intimacy, sexuality, relationships and the role of the artist.
This exhibition will continue through to 12 November 2016.
Find out more here.
Dani Marti, Still life in yellow, steel and mandarins (installation view), 2016, mixed media.
"What drew me to art in the first place was this way of communicating through the creation of something; an object that can resist speech and that can be powerfully silent."
Art Almanac interviewed JUSTINE KHAMARA about her recent exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery, Stratum.
Justine Khamara, Stratum (installation view), ARC ONE Gallery.
A new exhibition at Glen Eira City Council Gallery, A Collecting Vision: Ten Cubed, will feature eight works by PAT BRASSINGTON. The exhibition features key works by mid-career and established Australian and international artists from the Ten Cubed Collection, offering an insight into the evolution of this significant and diverse collection of contemporary art. Now in its sixth year of operation as a private art collection open to the public, Ten Cubed continues its objective to acquire and promote the work of 10 outstanding contemporary artists over a 10 year period, with a recent commitment to collect an additional 10 artists.
A Collecting Vision: Ten Cubed will run from 7 to 30 October 2016.
Pat Brassington, The Flight of the Duchess, 2013, pigment print, 83 x 120 cm.
A fantastic review of Troubled Waters, including work by JANET LAURENCE, has been published by Artlink. Troubled Waters is a suite of interdisciplinary exhibitions and projects that consider the impact of human activity and climate change on natural and marine environments, currently on view at the UNSW Galleries until 5 November.
Ann Finegan describes Laurence's work:
"Janet Laurence’s multimedia installation was the most compelling. Her trademark glass vessels, filled with drinking water, sat like flasks on a riverbank over a flowing river of semi-transparent white fabric onto which were projected the ghostly swimming skeletons of tiny fish and micro organisms. This highlighted the disconnect between town and country, between the life-supporting water of fragile inland river systems and, a world away, the sterile product of filtered city water from plentiful coastal dams."
Janet Laurence and Andrew Belletty, River Journey, 2016, multimedia installation based on the audio and visual research archive of Professor Richard Kingsford. Installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Photo: silversalt
