Reviews of exhibitions in Melbourne and around Australia. If you are interested in providing a review please contact Katrina Grant webmaster@melbourneartnetwork We prefer that you send a proposal before writing or submitting the full review.
The latest NGV exhibition is, again, sourced largely from a secondary French museum (the Musée Marmottan Monet, henceforth MMM). Monet exhibitions have traditionally draw large crowds, and are much loved by gallery directors needing to feed the political machines to which they are beholden that equate numbers with success. But if ‘Monet’ is the...
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Barocci: Brilliance and Grace is one of the most stimulating and well curated exhibitions to be held in London in recent years. There is in fact a relative wealth of religious art exhibitions in London currently, the equally excellent Murillo & Justino de Neve: the art of friendship is on show at the Dulwich...
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Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart, Paintings 1940-2011 Chris van Rompaey Jeffrey Smart’s work has long been notable for its hard-edged representation of urban wastelands in a manner that is at once poetically resonant and uncompromisingly classical. A recent retrospective, originally shown at two Adelaide venues and subsequently, in part, at the TarraWarra Museum of...
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The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania’s much-hyped art museum of sex and death, has just turned two. Built to house the personal collection of gambling millionaire David Walsh, MONA was opened to much fanfare and speculation in 2011. Two years on, has the gallery grown into a contrary toddler peddling the smutty...
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There are many reasons to celebrate the work of Louise Bourgeois at this particular time and in this specific place. Her powerfully moving works have cemented her place in the canon of significant twentieth and twenty-first century artists, not least of all in Australia because of the strong affinities between the artist’s work and...
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The ‘Four Horsemen’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria draws together a rich, varied and evocative selection of images of death: the horseman crushing rich and poor alike beneath the hooves of his skeletal horse; the shadowy figure stalking the young and the beautiful; the horrors of war; the terrors of the final...
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J.W. Power: Abstraction – Création Paris 1934 Reviewed by Sheridan Palmer J.W. Power: Abstraction – Création Paris 1934, Sydney University Art Gallery, open now until January 26th, 2013. On the fiftieth anniversary of the J. W. Power bequest to the University of Sydney, an exhibition and catalogue produced by the University Art Gallery and Power Institute...
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Sydney Long: The Spirit of the Land Reviewed by Caroline Jordan Only at the National Gallery of Australia, 17 August—11 November, 2012, with a catalogue by Anne Gray and Roger Butler. Exhibition is closed but the website and image galleries are still available on the NGA website here. Sydney Long is one of the painters...
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Radiance. The Neo-Impressionists Reviewed by David R. Marshall Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists. National Gallery of Victoria, 16 November 2012 – 17 March 2013 Impressionism was killed by theory, the theory that gave the Neo-impressionists their identity. Neo-Impressionist theory picked up on Impressionism’s naturalism and acute observation of outdoor light effects (coloured shadows and so forth)...
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The Masters of Chaos / Les Maîtres du Desordre Review by Victoria Hobday The Masters of Chaos / Les Maîtres du Desordre at Quai Branly, Paris, 11 April — 29 July 2012 Europe is engulfed in financial chaos and existential crisis, so this is the perfect time for an exhibition about controlling chaos by appealing to the...
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