'Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years' has been reviewed by John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years looks at the works produced from 1981-89, when the artist and his family lived on Sydney's North Shore. Tillers started to experiment with small, store-bought canvas boards that could be laid side-by-side, like tiles, to create wall-sized compositions.
The survey exhibition continues until Sunday 4 Feb at Mosman Art Gallery
Photo: Jacquie Manning
PETER DAVERINGTON has just completed an epic large-scale mural at the Lofts in Beacon, New York. Executed entirely in spray paint, Daverington's mural depicts an idealised landscape, like the Hudson River School artists before him. To capture the essence of the valley, he amalgamated features of the region, including Bannerman Island and the Catskill Mountains, all tied together by the Hudson River.
"The romantic tradition of landscape painting really came on the back of the Industrial Revolution, of which this valley was a key player," explains Daverington. "The impact the revolution was having on the environment led the Hudson River School painters to focus on the beauty of nature. When I started incorporating the school into my work, I didn't even know what the Hudson River was. But it's really an essential piece of America." - Peter Daverington
ARC ONE has once again teamed up with the VCA to offer an Artist Opportunity to an outstanding graduate from the VCA Masters or Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) Program. We are thrilled to announce that Grace Stevenson has been awarded the 2024 ARC ONE Artist Opportunity.
Grace's exquisitely painted uncanny portraits explore the anonymity of identity through portraiture and the found image. We look forward to showcasing Grace's work in a group exhibition at the gallery next year.
This is the second year that ARC ONE has partnered with the Victorian College of the Arts to present this award. We are proud to be supporting this outstanding graduate.
Edited by Charles Green and Ian McLean, designed by Beaziyt Worcou, and conceived as part of a colloquium of art historians convened at the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre – the Yolgnu art centre in Yirrkala, situated in north-east Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Top End – this book aims to tease out and better understand the transnational resonances and connections between artists across cultures and borders that increasingly shape the emerging post-Western world.
During the past half-century, contemporary art practices, theories and criticism have engaged intently with notions of the postnational. Nonetheless, the presence of the nation-state and nationalisms in art history remain steadfast. In posing the question ‘What is postnational art history?’ this publication aims not for definitive answers, but rather to broach the broader concept of postnationalism and how it might function to disrupt, rethink and complicate established discourses around national art.
A collection of essays, reflections and conversations, this new book features contributions from ARC ONE Gallery artists CHARLES GREEN and DESMOND LAZARO, alongside authors including Anna Arabindah-Kesson, Rex Butler, Wulan Dirgantoro, A.D.S. Donaldson, James Elkins, Helen Hughes, Nicholas Jose, Susan Lowish, Carol Yinghua Lu, Margaret MacNamidhe, Ian McLean, Nina Miall, Nikos Papastergiadis, Nur Shkembi, Terry Smith, and Mr Wanambi.
Grotto launches a solo exhibition from Honey Long and Prue Stent at GOMMA, Rome.
“In Grotto – explains the curator and gallerist Camilla Carè – Long and Stent bring a series of surreal snapshots that speak of mystery, letting us enter a synthetic cave of their imagination. The artists use their camouflaged bodies, allowing faceless apparitions to emerge from the female form. Sometimes statuesque, sometimes creators, the bodies in Grotto inhabit a timeless space. We have a history of appropriations behind us. Of lands, of bodies, of animal, vegetal and aquatic otherness. In the thirst for individual existence, these colonizers proceeded to categorize, designing a modern past under the banner of the supremacy of man and science over nature. To this day, there still remains a cultural weight on these bodies, which instead claim their belonging to an interdependent plurality. We flow, they seem to whisper. They are human, non-human and more-than-human beings, aquatic and shimmering and changeable forms, which draw new relationships between the organic and inorganic world.”
Today marks the opening of 'IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS' curated by Kelly McDonald at the Mosman Art Gallery in Sydney.
The exhibition explores the pivotal moment in the 1980s when Tillers began creating large-scale canvasboard paintings while living in a small Federation duplex in Mosman. IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS features 25 works from the last four decades, and will include the first canvasboard work Tillers ever created in 1981.
Imants Tillers, View, 1989, oilstick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 72 canvasboards, nos. 21007–21078 228.6 x 304.8 cm Private collection
Judith Blackall has written a profile on Jacky Redgate, discussing her exhibition Hyponagogia with Mirrors - old and new work, 1977- 2023, currently on display at the Wollongong Art Gallery.
Desmand Lazaro is now showing 'Point and Line to Plane', a specially commissioned artist project, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated by Jackie Dunn.
Nestled in the heart of the AGNSW's major exhibition 'Kandinsky', Lazaro’s work explores our fundamental relationship with the cosmos through ‘sacred geometries’ – the hidden meaning of shapes – probing the laws of art and nature to consider their mysteries. It features several of Lazaro's interstellar paintings and sketchbooks, combined with some truly beautiful exhibition design inspired by Lazaro's work.
Congratulations to Imants Tillers who has been awarded the University of Sydney's 2023 Alumni Award for Cultural Contribution. Awarded to alumni who have achieved excellence in the arts, culture or creative sectors, it recognises those whose efforts have promoted the understanding and values of cultural diversity.
Though he was studying architecture, Tillers was drawn to the arts and the culture around the newly-formed Tin Sheds galleries. The style he developed in this period has made him one of Australia's most recognisable post-modern artists.
Tillers recent exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery ‘After De Chirico’ explored a relationship which transcends the usual definitions of homage and influence. Maintaining an intimacy with the work of Giorgio de Chirico over five decades, Tillers interest in de Chirico is spurred on not only by the early so-called ‘metaphysical’ paintings that made him legendary amongst the early Surrealist artists, but also the once-controversial, much reviled ‘late’ paintings.
Last night Sydney-based artist Anne Zahalka was named winner of the 2023 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize for her work Kunstkammer (2023).
Rhana Devenport (ONZM, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia) and Michael Cook (Brisbane-based contemporary photographic artist of Bidjara heritage) joined MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea to select the winner and three Honourable Mentions from a shortlist of 66 exceptional works.
The judges comments:
'Anne Zahalka’s archival project is a mammoth undertaking documenting a lifetime of practice, both monumental and intimate, this work is rare and important.' — Rhana Devenport
'I was looking for works that created an emotional response and was amazed with the depth in the entire field. Winner Anne Zahalka’s work stood out given the huge scale she has produced that travels beyond the two dimensions.' — Michael Cook
'Anne’s Zahalka’s ‘Kunstkammer’ is a tour-de-force reflecting a practice that she has sustained for more than 40 years. This work challenges assumptions about photography and how immersive and experiential it can be on a grand scale. It invites you into the artist’s process and innerworkings in a way few artists have ever achieved.' — Anouska Phizacklea
Visit MAPh to view this work, alongside the other incredible finalists.
JACKY REDGATE’S new, major solo exhibition Hypnagogia with Mirrors: Old and New Work, 1977-2023, has recently opened at the Wollongong Art Gallery.
Hypnagogia with Mirrors is an artist project that encompasses some of Jacky Redgate's best-known works along with others previously unseen, and new and archival materials. In her work, mirrors are at once means and metaphors, reflecting other times, other dimensions. This show is also site-specific, playing on the Wollongong Art Gallery’s architecture, history, and collection.
One of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Redgate has a practice extending across six decades. Emerging within the contexts of late modernism, minimalism and conceptualism, and feminism, she is known for her photographic and sculptural works exploring systems and logics, impersonal and personal.
The exhibition is open 16 September-26 November 2023.
Jacky Redgate, Wedding Wishes, 1977, resin, doll head, plastic, fabric, 13.5 x 18.5 x 18.5cm.
HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT at Fotografiska Berlin opening today in the international exhibition, NUDE.
The exhibition features the works of thirty female-identifying artists from 20 different countries challenging traditional constructs around body politics. Through a diverse range of creative approaches, the artists explore the complexities surrounding the portrayal of nudity in art – and challenging the historical constraints attached to it.
NUDE addresses the centuries-long fascination with the naked body and explores the balance between “the nude” as an idealized form versus an honest, natural, and personal artistic expression.
Curated by Johan Vikner and Thomas Schäfer, from 14 September – 21 January 2024.
ARC ONE Gallery has brought together two giants of contemporary Australian art. A strong visual heartbeat runs through the new work of MURRAY FREDERICKS and JANET LAURENCE, who are presenting the extremities of fire and ice at Sydney Contemporary.
Murray Fredericks’ much-anticipated series BLAZE is debuting in Australia at the fair. Using non-destructive methods, Fredericks creates phantastic images of fire and flood by conjuring dramatic fires within vast deluged river systems. Janet Laurence presents an extraordinary new body of work addressing her passionate concern for the plight of Antarctica. Both artists have the capacity to arrest audiences in their tracks and this display asks us to sit with some of the most important questions facing our planet this century.
Fredericks’ BLAZE series has bewitched audiences across the world. Undeniably intense, there is a biblical quality to Fredericks’ images. The making of BLAZE was documented in a behind-the scenes film that accompanies the display at Sydney Contemporary, giving audiences a glimpse into the epic lengths Fredericks goes to capture the perfect image.
Janet Laurence’s breath-taking series Once Were Forests creates visceral waves of intense feeling. They address Laurence’s research into ice climates; as she says, “All these glacial experiences live with me”. She has visited places such as Antarctica and Iceland, and a great gravitas lays at the very centre of these beautiful, layered works. We see our own sense of urgency reflected in her compositions. There are few who can resist the enfolding testimony that Laurence offers. We are compelled not to look away.
Janet Laurence has been awarded one of the Falling Walls Science Breakthroughs of the Year for 2023.
Having recently been to the Antarctic and working with scientists there, I feel the need to make this extraordinary and fragile place comprehensible through art. Antarctica's unraveling, through catastrophic climate change, needs to be demystified and brought to a broad audience. Antarctica's future will determine our ways of being on the planet."
Laurence will be in Berlin later this year to attend the Falling Walls Science Summit, discussing the hidden complexities of Antarctic exploration and the need for fostering empathy alongside environmental consciousness.
Geraldine Doogue interviews Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial Dr Anthea Gunn about History painting: market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan (2008), a work by Lyndell Brown & Charles Green, currently on display in Art in Conflict at the SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney.
You can listen to the full interview to hear more about Brown and Green's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan here.
Contemporary visions: works from the ACU Art Collection features examples of the work of sixty esteemed artists, mainly but not solely from Australia, whose practice ranges over painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, glass, and ceramics.
Forty-five authors, largely from academic and curatorial contexts, draw on their deep knowledge of visual art to document and elucidate the assembled artworks. Writers such as Kelly Gellatly, Sue Cramer, and Anne O’Hehir have reflected on major works by Imants Tillers, Robert Owen, Murray Fredericks and Janet Laurence (in collaboration with Julie Rrap).
Head to the ACU Art Collection merchandise to order.
Dani Marti was a finalist this year, with the rhythmic work 'Between - 'Llunyanies Fosquejades' at the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award.
This nationally acclaimed, acquisitive biennial prize celebrates the diversity and strength of textile art across Australia.
Twenty years of Cyrus Tang's practice is being celebrated in The Memory Palace, an exhibition at Hawthorn's Town Hall Gallery from July 26 to 21 October 2023.
Tang is fascinated by the paradox of reconstructing ephemeral mental images and sensations in permanent materials. The result is hauntingly beautiful works that often memorialise collective experiences.
Dani Marti is featureed in HIV Science as Art from 24 July through to 5 August 2023 at Metro Arts in Brisbane, Australia.
HIV Science as Art is an exhibit that highlights some of the world’s best HIV science through art in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on HIV Science. This exhibition bringis the scientific advancements in HIV to life through the work of twelve artists living with HIV from around the world. Proudly presented by IAS and NAPWHA, proceeds from the sale of artwork will go to HIV programs and services in the Asia/Pacific region.
In the Arms of Unconsciousness: Women, Feminism & the Surreal features a selection of works including Pat Brassington, Julie Rrap, Honey Long & Prue Stent, among other significant contemporary Australian artists on display at Hazelhurst Arts Centre from 1 July 2023 to 10 September 2023.
Sitting within a renewed global interest in women artists and Surrealism, this ambitious exhibition explores ideas of feminism and the surreal, proposing an intrinsic between the two, particularly in contemporary Australian art practice over the decades.
Installation view of a selection of works by Pat Brassington, In the arms of unconsciousness: Women, feminism and the surreal, Hazelhurst Arts Centre