Tag: Exhibition Review

Exhibition Review | The APW George Collie Memorial Award – Sheridan Palmer | Australian Print Workshop

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An exhibition of limited edition prints by two of Australia’s most prominent printmakers, Jennifer Marshall and the late Bea Maddock (1934-2016) is currently being shown at the Australian Print Workshop in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy (until 20th August). The APW presents the annual George Collie Memorial Award in recognition of artists who have made an outstanding contribution to contemporary Australian printmaking. It has previously been awarded to Noel Counihan and Rick Amor in 2014 and Grahame King and Jan Senbergs in 2015, and this year the prestigious honour is awarded to two women. Bea Maddock studied at the Hobart Technical College and completed post-graduate painting and printmaking at the Slade School of Art under William Coldstream, Ceri Richards and Anthony Cross. She was later appointed lecturer in printmaking at the National Gallery School and the Victorian College of the Arts from…

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Exhibition Review | Whistler’s Mother | NGV International

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The National Gallery of Victoria’s latest loan exhibition is based around a single painting by James McNeil Whistler – his Arrangement in grey and black no. 1 of 1871, popularly known as the Portrait of the artist’s mother, or just ‘Whistler’s Mother’. Compared to the just-closed Warhol/Wei Wei summer blockbuster, this is a small, intimate exhibition. The painting is on loan from the Musée d’Orsay and the exhibition is filled out with etchings, prints, paintings, furniture and decorative arts from the NGV’s permanent collection. The exhibition sets this single painting into a fresh context, one that enriches our understanding of Whistler and allows us to see works from the NGV collection in a new light. I find it impossible to really talk about this exhibition without first dealing with the language being used to promote it. We are told (in the marketing…

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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 | Medieval Moderns, National Gallery of Victoria | Monique Webber

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Medieval Moderns: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,  NGV International, 11 April – 12 July 2020 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) burnt brightly and quickly. Forming in 1848, the seven original artists – John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, William Michael Rossetti, and Frederic George Stephens – worked cohesively for little more than five years. Only Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti remained directly involved in the movement. While Hunt continued as a largely independent artist, Rossetti later became a driving force in the second generation of the Brotherhood centred around William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Despite the brevity of their activity, the PRB had a profound influence upon the Industrial era. Rejecting the enforced hierarchies of beauty and genre of the Academy, they adopted Ford Madox Brown’s search for humanity and nature in art. Their aim to revitalise…

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Exhibition Review | Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino at Palazzo Strozzi and Baccio Bandinelli at The Bargello: an appreciation | Esther Theiler

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Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism and Baccio Bandinelli, Sculptor and Master (1493-1560) Reviewed by Esther Theiler Palazzo Strozzi and the Bargello have provided not only welcome respite from the heat in Florence this summer but also rewarding opportunities for appraising the threads of influence of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo as they metamorphosed into the style most often characterised as mannerist. The curators at the Palazzo Strozzi have made a considered decision to call this style the “modern manner” rather than mannerism, in accordance, they believe, with sixteenth century usage (even though the English language version of the exhibition still uses ‘mannerism’). Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism is the first exhibition since Pontormo and Early Florentine Mannerism (a 1956 exhibition also held at Palazzo Strozzi) to bring together a substantial canon of work…

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Exhibition Review | Atua: sacred gods from Polynesia | David Hansen

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  This is a ‘pre-print’ version of a review to be published by the University of Hawai’i Press in The Contemporary Pacific (vol. 17 no.1) in early 2015. Atua: sacred gods from Polynesia is on at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra from 23 May – 3 August 2020 As you pass between the split-text panels at the entrance to Atua: sacred gods from Polynesia, your first encounter is with two semi-abstract totemic figures from a ritual sanctuary or marae, carved by contemporary Cook Island artist Eruera Nia. Embedded in a low, square, grey plinth, these silver-weathered woodenarabesques or parentheses are at once descriptive and abstract, hieratic and dynamic, leaping up into vision and consciousness in a manner comparable to that of the Gallery’s modernist masterpiece, Constantin Brancusi’s Birds in Space. Then, as you turn right to enter the exhibition proper, you…

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Exhibition Review | For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation – John Weretka

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For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation is on at the Ballarat Art Gallery until the 27th July 2014. Victorian regional galleries are more than pulling their weight when it comes to hosting exhibitions in centres beyond Melbourne, as Genius and Ambition: The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1768-1918 at the Bendigo Art Gallery has recently proved. Ballarat Art Gallery is playing host to For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation, curated by Alison Inglis and Patricia Tryon Macdonald. The sheer scale of the exhibition, which surely must make it one of the — if not the — most significant exhibitions of Scotland-related material in Australian history, makes it noteworthy. Spanning four gallery spaces of the Ballarat Art Gallery, the exhibition is co-ordinated under five main subject areas.…

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Exhibition Review | Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court | Katrina Grant

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Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado Reviewed by Katrina Grant The exhibition runs until until 31st August 2014 at the NGV International, St Kilda Rd. This exhibition tells two stories. The first is the story of Italian art from Raphael to Tiepolo and the second is the story of Spanish engagement with Italian art over this period. The exhibition highlights the close artistic relationship between Italy and Spain in the Early Modern period. It includes paintings that were directly commissioned by the Spanish Royal family from such artists as Titian, as well as works collected a century or more after they were painted, such as the Holy Family by Raphael. There are also works by artists who travelled to Spain to undertake commissions in various royal residences. And, of course, there are paintings by a number of…

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Exhibition Review | Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice | David Packwood

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Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice David Packwood Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice is on at the National Gallery, London, 2014 until the 15th June 2014. It was written,  then, on my page in the Book of Fate that at two in the afternoon of the sixth day of June in the year 2014 that I, along with a friend, should attend an exhibition of Paolo Veronese for the first time within the hallowed halls of the London, National Gallery. “Veronese” is no longer just a name to me, or a reproduction in a book, or a digital image floating on a computer screen. In this exhibition I begin to grasp the man behind the banquets, the purveyor of large altarpieces, the manufacturer of political allegories- the man who unwittingly gave birth to a school in which the best pupil was…

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Exhibition Review | Genius and Ambition. The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1768–1918 | David R. Marshall

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Genius and Ambition. The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1768–1918 David R. Marshall   At the Bendigo Art Gallery 2 March–9 June 2014. (Closes 9 June; an exhibition of antique sculpture from the British Museum follows on 2 August.) The regional galleries have some interesting exhibitions on at the moment. At the Ballarat Art Gallery is Auld Lang Syne while at Bendigo, with only a few days to run, is Genius and Ambition, which consists largely of works from the Royal Academy, London and is an exhibition generated by Bendigo and the only Australian venue. Following the success of its fashion shows, especially Grace Kelly, the Bendigo Gallery has stimulated an arts-led tourism industry serving day-trippers from Melbourne who come by car, train or chartered bus. Bendigo has a lot of offer in this respect. Its architectural charms are considerable,…

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Exhibition Review | Rome: Piranesi’s Vision | Katrina Grant

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Rome: Piranesi’s Vision Katrina Grant  State Library of Victoria, 22nd February until 22nd June 2014. Free exhibition. ‘When I first saw the remains of the ancient buildings of Rome lying as they do in cultivated fields or in gardens and wasting away under the ravages of time, or being destroyed by greedy owners who sell them as materials for modern buildings, I determined to preserve them for ever by means of my engravings’ – Giovanni Battista Piranesi Piranesi wrote this in his preface to the Antichità romane and it is just one of his many statements that declare his dedication to Rome. His views of Rome stand as a record of the past glories of Ancient Rome, each engraving carefully labelled so that we can identify the fragments of ruined monuments. They also record aspects of the Early Modern city of Rome that…

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Exhibition Review | The Treasures of Naples | John Weretka

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Il Tesori di Napoli: I Capolavori del Museo di San Gennaro John Weretka Palazzo Sciarra, Rome 30th October 2013-16 February 2014 (now extended until March) Wowing enthusiastic crowds at the Palazzo Sciarra in Rome is a show entitled Treasures of Naples: Masterworks of the Museum of S. Gennaro. Although compact in size, this show brings together some of the prized objects of the Treasury of S. Gennaro, normally held at the Museum of the Treasury of S. Gennaro in Naples; this is the first time a collection of these objects has been permitted to travel. The opening room of this exhibition swiftly sets up the cultural context of S. Gennaro with Francesco Solimena’s magnificent 1702 painting of S. Gennaro blessing, a copy of the Voto della città di Napoli of 1527 that established the Deputation of the Chapel of S.…

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Exhibition Review | ‘America: Painting a Nation’. Reviewed by Diane Kirkby.

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America: Painting a Nation Diane Kirkby  America: Painting a Nation is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 8th November 2013 – 9th February 2014. At a time when historians are increasingly displacing nation-building as the purpose for knowing the past, it could seem a retrograde step to make this the foundation principle through which to showcase important works of art. Nevertheless, an exhibition organised around the concept of Painting a Nation immediately provokes questions about meaning and definitions that may not have simple answers. Approaching the exhibition as a historian of the United States and its art, I was mindful of the question former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes asked: ‘What can you learn about America by looking at its art?’ The answer found here is, unfortunately, nothing of depth. It is valuable to have these questions prompted:…

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Exhibition Review | Masculin/Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 a nos jours. Reviewed by Victoria Hobday.

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MAN looks at Men: Masculin/Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 a nos jours (Masculine/Masculine. The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day) Victoria Hobday Masculin/Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 a nos jours is on at the Musée d’Orsay (24 September 2013—2 January 2014) *Please note that this review includes images of male nudity. In September the Musée d’Orsay opened its autumn and winter exhibition Masculin/Masculin: L’homme nu dans l’art de 1800 á nos jours. This exhibition follows a similar one last year at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Nackte Manner (Nude Males), which brought together a number of important works from 1800 to the present day. The president of the Musée d’Orsay, Guy Cogeval, decided that ‘nude males’ as a subject was a genuinely under-examined topic. With seven new curators who had recently joined the…

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