Tag: Australian Art

Exhibition Review | Lurid Beauty: Surrealism and its Echoes | Katrina Grant

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Lurid Beauty: Surrealism and its Echoes NGV Australia, Federation Square. The exhibition closes on the 31st January 2016. “Surrealism is a word that is applied to those forms of creative art which are evolved, not from the conscious mind, but from the deeper recesses of the subconscious. The theory of Surrealism is based upon a belief that the logical mind, with its prescribed formulas of thought, is incapable of expressing the entire range of human experience and aspiration. To express such a range, the complete mechanism of the human mind must be utilised.” James Gleeson This description by James Gleeson is from his essay published in Art & Australia in 1940 ‘What is Surrealism’, which explained the principals and rationale driving the new movement. It is on display in the first room of the NGV’s current Lurid Beauty exhibition (alongside books,…

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Public Forum | The Art of Howard Arkley | TarraWarra Museum of Art

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Join us for a panel discussion and audience Q & A with three of Arkley’s friends, colleagues, and fellow artists, Callum Morton, Jenny Watson and Constanze Zikos. This event promises to provide fascinating insights into Arkley’s practice and processes, highlighting his immersion and influence within a vibrant artistic milieu from the mid-1970s through to the late 1990s. Date: 2pm-3:30pm, 6th February 2016 Venue: TarraWarra Museum of Art, 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road,Healesville, Victoria, Australia Tickets: Adults $25, TWMA Members $12.50, Seniors $22.50, Student, Pension & Healthcare card holders $20.00 Website and bookings: http://www.twma.com.au/events/public-forum-the-work-of-howard-arkley/  

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Panel Discussion | Australian Surrealism | NGV International

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Surrealism had a profound impact on Australian art and creative life. The movement encouraged young artists such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and James Gleeson to challenge conventions, forever changing the Australian art world. Discover the rich legacy of Surrealism on Australian art, past and present, in a conversation between an artist, curators and an academic. Speakers Tim Schultz, Artist Lesley Harding, Curator, Heide Museum of Modern Art Dr Anthony White, Senior Lecturer, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne Simon Maidment, Curator, Contemporary Art, NGV Date: 2pm Saturday 28th August 2015 Venue:  NGV Australia Booking required: $16 M / $20 A / $18 C Book online.

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Exhibition | Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes | NGV International

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Exhibition Dates: 9 Oct 15 – 31 Jan 16 at the National Gallery of Victoria Australia. Opening weekend events include a talk by Peter Ellis, surrealist artist and RMIT Associate Professor, artist Peter Daverington and talks from the Curator’s Collective with NGV curators Max Delany, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art; Elena Taylor, Curator; Simon Maidment, Curator, Contemporary Art; Alisa Bunbury, Curator, Prints and Drawings; and Danielle Whitfield, Curator, Fashion and Textiles. See the website for full details and times – http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/curators-collective/#date0 Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century. Noted for their experimental and playful approaches, Surrealist artists sought to challenge artistic conventions, opening their work to unexpected results and to the accidental image. Through techniques such as automatic drawing and collage, artists worked with the aim of liberating the unconscious mind to effect social and political…

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Seminar | S. T. Gill as eyewitness: art as historical evidence | State Library of Victoria

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This seminar is part of the Making Public Histories series. Celebrating the first-ever retrospective of one of Australia’s forgotten artists, S. T. Gill, this seminar reflects on Gill as an ‘eyewitness’ to colonial life in nineteenth century Australia. Join us for the inside story on how historians have used Gill’s works to make sense of the colonial past, from the Victorian goldfields to horse-racing. Chair: Associate Professor Alison Inglis, University of Melbourne Speakers: Emeritus Prof. Sasha Grishin (ANU, Exhibition curator), Dr Jan Croggon (Historian, Sovereign Hill Museums Association) and Dr Andrew Lemon (professional historian) This is a free event, but bookings are essential – click here to book. This event accompanies the current State Library of Victoria exhibition Australian sketchbook: Colonial life and the art of ST Gill. Date: September 29, 2020 at 6pm – 7:30pm Venue: State Library of…

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News and Writing on Art and Art History | August 24th 2015

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A round-up of art news and reviews from the past week. Another day, another spurious Leonardo discovery. This time scientists claim to have discovered that Leonardo deliberately developed a specific technique and that there are stylistic similarities between his works. Groundbreaking. This sort of ‘arts reporting’ is really just lazy reprinting of press releases without any real journalism, something that is underlined by the report in the Telegraph where they mistakenly use an image of the so-called Isleworth Mona Lisa, a much later copy, which was itself the subject of another Leonardo media frenzy a few years ago. Leonardo is obvious clickbait for media so perhaps you shouldn’t give them the satisfaction and read one of these more interesting articles instead. The National Gallery of Australia has announced a Tom Roberts ‘blockbuster’ for its summer exhibition, as well as rehang of the permanent collection. At the announcement Director…

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Exhibition | In Fond Memory: The Barbara Tucker Gift

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From 22 August 2015, Heide Museum of Modern Art will present In Fond Memory: The Barbara Tucker Gift, an exhibition that will commemorate Barbara Tucker’s extraordinary contribution to Heide and celebrate her continuing presence in the life of the museum. On 16 May 2020 Heide Museum of Modern Art sadly lost one of its most treasured friends and supporters. Barbara Tucker had a long association with Heide, initially as a personal acquaintance of John and Sunday Reed with her late husband, artist Albert Tucker, then during the evolution of the museum as Heide Fellow (2000), Life Benefactor (2004) and Co-Patron. Prior to Albert’s death in 1999, the Tuckers offered Heide a major donation of artworks, to be transferred progressively over a number of years. To their minds it was a fitting acknowledgement of the role the Reeds had played in both…

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Exhibition | Colour Sensation: The Works of Melinda Harper | Heide MOMA

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Exhibition dates: Saturday 27 June – Sunday 25 October 2020 Over the last three decades, Melinda Harper has developed a distinctive and widely admired body of abstract works animated by brilliant colour relationships and dazzling arrangements of geometric shapes. While Harper is best known as a painter, this exhibition will reveal the diversity of her practice through its inclusion of drawings, collages, screenprints, experimental photographs, painted assemblages and exquisite hand stitched embroideries. It also marks the first time in recent years that Heide will present a solo exhibition of an artist whose work is entirely abstract. Harper’s first exhibition was in 1987 at Pinacotheca gallery in Melbourne and she was a leading member of the Store 5 artists’ group in Melbourne (1989–1993). Initially small in scale and simple in composition—as much due to economical as aesthetic considerations—her paintings have since…

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Exhibitions | Linda Marrinon and Dominik Lang | MUMA

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Two new exhibitions opening next week at MUMA. Exhibition Dates: 11 July – 19 September 2020 Opening function Wednesday 15 July 2015, 6-8pm. With remarks by Robyn McKenzie, writer and art historian Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015 A key figure in Australian art since the mid-1980s, Linda Marrinon has developed an idiosyncratic language of painting and drawing steeped in postmodernist irony and feminist wit. Over the last decade, Marrinon has concentrated her attention on a significant body of entrancing and enigmatic figurative sculptures, forty-eight of which are brought together from public and private collections around Australia at the Monash University Museum of Art for Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015. Like many of her peers who established their reputations in the 1980s, Marrinon draws her references from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, presenting a series of archetypes, intermingling soldiers, maids, matrons, ingénues, twins, travellers,…

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Conference | ST Gill and the colonial world conference | State Library of Victoria

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In this free conference, curators and art historians discuss the art, life and times of the nineteenth-century Australian artist ST Gill, whose work is showcased in the Australian sketchbook: Colonial life and the art of ST Gill exhibition (17 July to 25 October 2020). The conference will feature papers and discussions presented by Professor Sasha Grishin, art historian and curator of Australian sketchbook; David Hansen, Associate Professor, Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University; Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, National Gallery of Australia; Angus Trumble, Director, National Portrait Gallery; Daniel Thomas, art historian and curator; Dr Isobel Crombie, Assistant Director, National Gallery of Victoria; Alisa Bunbury, Curator, National Gallery of Victoria; Associate Professor Alison Inglis, University of Melbourne; Shane Carmody, University of Melbourne; and Professor Andrew J May, University of Melbourne. Keynote lecture | Sheila O’Connell George Cruikshank (1792-1878):…

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Tracey Moffat Talk at CCP

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“I would rather talk to another artist about their art practice than discuss my own work”, Tracey Moffatt said in a recent interview published in the Spirited catalogue for the Queensland Art Gallery. This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear directly from Tracey Moffatt, one of Australia’s best known and most influential contemporary artists. In conjunction with her exhibition at CCP, Moffatt will give an exclusive public talk at the gallery. Join us for an evening of information sharing and discussion around Moffatt’s enduring and wide reaching practice. As an artist within the VCE syllabus in 2015, this is a valuable opportunity for educators to hear, first hand from Moffat. Date: Tuesday 7 July, 6pm—7.30pm Venue: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy Tickets: $10 students and CCP members, $15 non-members. Bookings essential. Book here > Website: http://www.ccp.org.au/lecture_series.php Born in Brisbane in 1960, Tracey Moffatt studied…

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Exhibition | Halcyon Days: Heide in the 1940s | Heide MOMA

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Exhibition Dates: Saturday 20 June – Sunday 13 September 2020 Throughout the 1940s, John and Sunday Reed’s home, Heide, formed a focal point for some of Australia’s most avant- garde artists, who rejected conventional ways of living and learning and spearheaded the modernist movement in Melbourne. This constellation of rising talent included the young Sidney Nolan, cerebral painter Albert Tucker and his partner Joy Hester, the quiet yet passionate Arthur Boyd and free-spirited John Perceval. Each developed a distinctive practice and came to hold an undisputed place in the canon of Australian art. Such was John and Sunday’s belief in this group that they supported them financially and materially and in some instances formed close attachments to them. As poet Barrett Reid observed, the Reeds provided a ‘total concentration of life’ at Heide, which not only gave rise to unprecedented…

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News | Betty Churcher dies aged 84

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Sad news that Betty Churcher OAM has died at the age of 84. She was the first woman director at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and at the National Gallery of Australia. At her death she was still only one of a handful of women who have held the top job in a state or national gallery (UPDATED, see below). As well as being one of Australia’s most accomplished arts administrators, Betty Churcher was also a great communicator about art. She is well known far beyond the gallery sector for her journalism and her television programs, which brought art and art history to a wide audience. From the ABC, full story here. Churcher was one of the most adored figures in the Australian art community and a formidable and talented arts administrator. She was known to thousands of Australians as the…

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Exhibition | Kate Beynon, Phase Change, and Earth and Sky | TarraWarra Museum of Art

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Three new exhibitions have opened at TarraWarra Museum of art. All exhibitions run from March 28th until 8th June 2015. Kate Beynon | An-Li: A Chinese Ghost TaleTALE Kate Beynon’s new body of work is inspired by a supernatural Chinese tale of two young spirits who traverse two worlds; one magically aquatic, the other earthly. Beynon has imagined the guiding spirit of the goddess Kwan Yin as their paths lead from tragedy to transformation, hope and healing. The works have been commissioned by Art and Australia for a new hardcover publication, An-Li: A Chinese Ghost Tale, edited by Laura Murray Cree, which will include the tale alongside colour reproductions of the works in this exhibition. The book will be launched to coincide with the exhibition. The exhibition will feature works on paper, paintings, an animated video and a suspended sculptural installation.…

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Symposium | The Legacy of Hugh Ramsay | National Gallery of Australia

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Hugh Ramsay’s life was short but his impact endures. In celebration of the endowment of a chair in Australian art history at the University of Melbourne in his name, by his great niece Patricia Fullerton, the Australian Institute of Art History together with the National Gallery of Australia present this one day symposium reassessing his legacies. Date: Monday 30th March 2015, 9:00am – 5.00 pm Venue: James O Fairfax Theatre Free to attend but bookings are essential. Register here. Program 9.45 – 11.00am SESSION ONE Hugh Ramsay and philanthropy Gerard Vaughan, Director, National Gallery of Australia The life of Hugh Ramsay Patricia Fullerton  Hugh Ramsay in an Australian Context Mary Eagle 11.30am – 12.30pm SESSION TWO Hugh Ramsay and George Lambert Anna Gray The portraiture of Hugh Ramsay Angus Trumble 2.00 – 3.00pm SESSION THREE Conservation of Ramsay’s paintings at the NGV Michael Varcoe-Cocks Ramsay’s paintings…

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