Tag: Review

Letter from North America | The Reopening of the Yale Center for British Art – Felicity Harley-McGowan

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After a sixteen-month closure, the Yale Center for British Art reopened to the Yale University community on the afternoon of Monday May 9. The excitement was palpable. People of all ages from all quarters of the university wove their way from bottom to top to bottom of the building – students, staff, faculty, donors, all transfixed and enthused by the space, and what they discovered in that space. It was a kind of viewer utopia I had not experienced before: strangers smiled and spoke to each other, people audibly admired and made remarks to each other as they marvelled at the return to life of a much loved building and its collection. Since opening to the public on May 11, the response to the renovation of the building and rehang of the collection has been resoundingly positive. The interior space…

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Exhibition Review | An Illumination: the Rothschild Prayer Book & other works from the Kerry Stokes Collection c.1280-1685| Ian Potter Museum of Art

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An Illumination: the Rothschild Prayer Book & other works from the Kerry Stokes Collection c.1280-1685 until Sunday 15th November 2015 It is always interesting to get a glimpse of a private collection and in this small but well-curated exhibition we are able to view a selection of art from the collection of Kerry Stokes. The objects on display are mostly religious in subject and have been chosen by curator (and leading expert on illuminated manuscripts) Margaret Manion to complement the display of the Rothschild Prayer Book, which Stokes bought in 2014. The exhibition is displayed across several galleries at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University. The galleries are dimly lit for this exhibition, the dark setting and carefully spot lit (no annoying glare on paintings) makes for an intimate and contemplative viewing experience, which suits the religious…

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Review | David Hansen on Danh Vo’s Slip of the Tongue in Venice

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Slip of the Tongue, Punta della Dogana, Venice 12 April-31 December 2015 Curated by Danh Vo in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois Venice: home of Marco Polo; key entrepôt on the Silk Road; the heart of a great and glittering maritime and mercantile empire. For hundreds of years the Most Serene Republic reached out across the Adriatic and the Mediterranean to the Eastern Empire and beyond, trading and plundering; the famous lion of St Mark atop the right-hand column of the Piazzetta, next to the Doge’s Palace, is probably 4th century BC Persian-Hellenistic; the Byzantine water-marble facing of the basilica of San Marco was stripped from Hagia Sophia during the sack of Constantinople at the time of the Fourth Crusade. Yet the city also has an intense historical and cultural specificity: an essentially Græco-Roman and Roman Catholic identity that underpins all its…

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Exhibition Review | TarraWarra Biennial 2014: Whisper In My Mask | Denise M. Taylor

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TarraWarra Biennial 2014 | Whisper In My Mask | AT TWMA until 16th November 2014 Reviewed by Denise M. Taylor Face masks of dough, wire and the Australian flag; portraits of royalty dripping with black paint; veils, dots and paper cut-outs masking memory and identity; videos hinting at masked abuses in Australia’s history—these are a few of the contemporary art works by approximately 20 Australian artists on display at the TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) Biennial 2014 exhibition, ‘Whisper in my Mask’—a clever take on a line from Grace Jones’ 1981 song ‘Art Groupie’: Touch Me in a Picture, Wrap Me in a Cast, Kiss Me in a Sculpture, Whisper in My Mask As Deborah Cheetham AO pointed out in her remarks at the opening of the exhibition on August 15th, the mist that most of us encountered across the…

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Exhibition Review | Australian Impressionists in France. Reviewed by Caroline Jordan

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Australian Impressionists in France Caroline Jordan The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) has offered a number of Impressionist blockbusters over 2012-13: Monet’s Garden, Radiance: the Neo-Impressionists and now Australian Impressionists in France. Given its present ubiquity in our state gallery, it is well to remember that when Impressionism debuted in France in the 1870s and 1880s it was considered to be beyond the pale of official patronage. Impressionism offended by rejecting the mythological, classical or historical subject matter of academic painting, replacing it with such unimportant things as dance halls, picnics, cabbage patches, haystacks, stretches of beach and random scenes of the street. Spurning the studio, the Impressionists ventured outdoors to paint direct from the motif, daubing slashes and spots of pure, bright colour onto white-primed or bare canvases. Impressionist compositions were similarly innovative, drawing on the novel influences of…

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Exhibition Review┃Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart, Paintings 1940-2011. Reviewed by Chris van Rompaey

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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 Art, Healesville, will be remembered as a fitting tribute to the career of this major Australian artist. Curated by Barry Pearce, the exhibition was split between the formative work of Smart’s Adelaide years and that of the five plus decades following his move to Sydney. It is the latter period, from 1955 to 2011 and encompassing his time in Sydney, Rome and Tuscany, that formed the focus of the TarraWarra exhibition. The tripartite division of the gallery space lent itself seamlessly to a structure which emphasised…

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Review | Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania. Reviewed by Anna Drummond

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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 and macabre, or a robust and confident youth cementing its place in the Australian cultural landscape?

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Exhibition Review | J.W. Power: Abstraction – Création Paris 1934. Reviewed by Sheridan Palmer

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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 revives Power the artist, who in Australia has until now been largely eclipsed by his philanthropy. The Power Bequest, at the time close to £2,000,000, was initially announced in 1961 and was intended to support the study of the Fine Arts and in particular the understanding of contemporary art. It came with a remarkable archive including Power’s papers — now held at the National Library of Australia — and some 1170 of Power’s own works of art. These range from his more juvenile Edwardian studies executed…

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Exhibition Review: Gabriel Metsu – National Gallery of Art, Washington by John Weretka

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Exhibition Review Gabriel Metsu  1629–1667 National Gallery of Art, Washington April 17 – July 24 2011 Reviewed by John Weretka Difficult as this is to believe for a painter of his significance, this is only the second comprehensive exhibition of Gabriel Metsu’s work, the last having occurred in 1966. Although confined to just two rooms in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and exhibiting almost forty of the painter’s panels, this show nonetheless makes a significant contribution to the study of Metsu, a painter whose works are confined largely to two decades (the 1650s and 1660s) and number scarcely over 130. The first room of the exhibition is largely, though not wholly, dedicated to the genre works of the 1650s and the second to domestic interiors popularised by Vermeer that occupied Metsu increasingly in the…

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Exhibition Review: Caroline Jordan: Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed, at the National Gallery of Victoria

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Exhibition Review ‘Terribly true to nature’: A review of Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, until 7 August 2011, followed by Brisbane and Canberra Reviewed by Caroline Jordan One of the big clichés of Australian art is that the first generation of landscape painters saw the landscape ‘through European eyes’. Fred McCubbin wrote in the 1890s that titans such as John Glover and Eugene von Guérard of the 1850s and 60s ‘ could not see the blue-green of the wattle… etc’. This was largely self-promotion on the part of McCubbin and his Australian-born Impressionist mates, artists of an up-and-coming generation who had been trained by von Guérard at the National Gallery School in the 1870s. As these Young Turks saw it, it fell to them to strip off the Old World blinkers and show the New…

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Victus Hobday – Magician of the Palimpsest: William Kentridge

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‘Magician of the Palimpsest – William Kentridge’ Cinq Thémes Paris, Jeu de Paume 29.06.10 – 5.09.10 NB:  This exhibition ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’ is currently on in Melbourne at ACMI, Federation Square until May 27th 2012 – see here for details of the Melbourne Show. The Jeu de Paume is a public gallery situated overlooking the Place de Concorde in a corner of the Tuilleries Garden. From the outside it appears to be a large classical mausoleum for retired double-decker buses or perhaps a large garden pavilion of the nineteenth century that would feature fusty old examples of gilt-framed dark offerings. It is deceptive. Once the home to the Impressionist works that are now housed in the Musee D’Orsay the Jeu de Paume was renovated in the early 1990’s with the new purpose of featuring individual artists and particularly retrospectives.…

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