Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i Art Guide Australia

Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London National Gallery of Australia 5 March—14 June Gallery curators, like the rest of us, know they won’t be travelling internationally for some time; so having treasures from one of the world’s finest collections come to us instead is very welcome, and a matter of good fortune. National Gallery of Australia curator Sally Foster says the exhibition Botticelli to Van Gogh was on its way here via Japan when the pandemic struck in force. Showing in Tokyo and Osaka, it got stuck there, but improved conditions in Australia eventually meant it could travel onwards. Had the collection, housed at the National Gallery in London, not left Britain when it first did, the chances of it showing in Australia would have been…

Textbook for Desire Cement Fondu 20 March—2 May “No simple map of the emotions is available here,” writes poet Anne Carson, in her efforts to illuminate the workings of our innermost impulses. “Desire is not simple.” This simultaneously complex and ambiguous way we intuit, enact and embody desire—personally and collectively—forms the departing point for Textbook for Desire. When preparing the exhibition, curator Josephine Skinner was feeling the impact of the #MeToo Movement, Black Lives Matter and Covid-19. Since desire is intrinsic to how we relate to each other, and also how we form and shape our worlds, it seemed like a fundamentally important topic. “I felt that it was urgent to focus on asking the question, ‘Who has written the textbook on desire until now?’” explains Skinner. “How might we…

When the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) closed its doors to the public in March 2020, the 15km-high searchlight beams of Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra (Tasmania) returned to the night sky. First seen in 2013 at the inaugural Dark Mofo festival, since Covid-19 shut down much of Hobart Spectra has streamed into the sky every Saturday night, a steady reminder of resilience. The sudden absence of physical arts and culture events proved difficult for many, and Mona was not immune to the effects of pandemic-related closure. During Mona’s nine months off-the-grid, only a skeleton staff kept the wheels turning from home and on site. However, while Spectra was shining bright and the public grounds were quiet, inside the museum things were slowly changing. With a future reopening date uncertain…

OSLO DAVIS: In mid-2020, when I was faced with the prospect of little or no paid work coming in, I had to do something. My Postcard Project, a mercifully Covid-free, direct-mail, original art project, in many ways saved me. I drew more than 300 postcards—some pretty, some wacky—and sent them out to friends and strangers who ordered them online, potluck style: you got what you were given. It helped pay the rent and kept my hands moving. But more than that, it activated my funny brain muscle. Absurdity and nonsense both have that unique power to disarm and tickle a viewer, if only for a microsecond. During recent dour times this tickle became a panacea—well, it was for me at least, but also hopefully for all the good folk who…

Bett Gallery www.bettgallery.com.au Level 1, 65 Murray Street, Hobart, 7000, TAS 03 6231 6511 Mon to Fri 10am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 19 February—6 March Dai Li, Michael Doolan and Michael Schlitz 12 March—3 April Disappearing Writers and Artists 9 April—1 May Iconotropy Rob O’Connor 9 April—1 May Fermented Preserves Georgia Morgan Colville Gallery www.colvillegallery.com.au 91 Salamanca Place, Hobart TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6224 4088 Daily 10am–5pm. See our website for latest information. 23 February—15 March Gothic Relief Paul Gundry 16 March—5 April Chasing the shadow Tony Woods 6 April—26 April New Works from the Hill 27 April—10 May Michael Muruste Minna Road Contemporary Art Tasmania www.contemporaryarttasmania.org 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 0445 Wed to Sun 12noon–5pm. See our…

Darling Darling Gabriella Hirst Australian Centre for the Moving Image 11 February—29 April Asking herself about the four edges that form the border of Australian landscape painter WC Piguenit’s 1899 work Flood in the Darling, 1890, Gabriella Hirst wondered about leakage. After all, the painting is full of water—and, looking at it, we might wonder what is beyond the frame. Rivers can never be contained or shown in their entirety, especially in a painting. For the aptly titled Darling Darling at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), created as part of the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, Hirst is presenting two back-to-back projections, playing simultaneously. While the distinct sounds from each film will leak into its companion film’s space, visitors will not be able to see both pieces…

Homo Suburbiensis Shaun Gladwell Anna Schwartz Gallery 6 February—24 April Shaun Gladwell has said that his artwork references “the sense of the body as a monument to its own potential power.” The body is the perpetual figure and subject of Gladwell’s work—the artist is famous for his slow-motion videos that bring skateboards, motorbikes, surf boards and BMXs into the gallery space. Yet his newest art seems to leave behind this boyhood territory to delve into domesticity and personal exercise, which arose with particular potency during Melbourne’s lockdown. In his three-decade practice, Gladwell often captures bodies in temporally-suspended moments as they glide, sustain and orient themselves; as a viewer, it’s more like a meta-discussion of how we experience the experience of bodies. Homo Suburbiensis follows this charted course with one single-channel…

Ctrl + H Astro Morphs 27 March—9 May In the dark, an edgeless figure is dancing. Its body is a portal through which coloured orbs glow, like the lights of distant planets or fish in the deepest ocean. From the primordial soup, Sox and Yow emerge. Sox and Yow are the speculative alter egos of Perth artists Bianca Sharkey and James Doohan, collectively known as Astro Morphs. The two characters and their narrative are central to the collaboration. Astro Morphs’ aesthetic is tactile, hands-on: down-to-earth as well as interplanetary. Their films feature animated backgrounds drawn in Texta or collaged with coloured paper. There are lavish costumes—all beading and sequins and papier-mâché—which are often exhibited alongside the films like museum relics. The vibe is both cosmological and biological, influenced by insects,…

At least since the opening in 1929 of ‘mother’s museum’, as Nelson Rockefeller dubbed the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), established with advocacy from his mother Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, contemporary art has been associated with support from women. In Australia, connections between contemporary art, women artists, and their audiences have been understood at least since the 1920s, but what is the situation today for women supporters of visual arts? Have women emerged as important philanthropists in the arts in Australia? And have they made an impact on the cultural landscape? The short answer is yes. Women are increasingly potent in the country’s cultural affairs as donors, both individually and collectively. But first, and importantly, there is very little hard data on women and philanthropy in general, let alone in the…

“What I think of as my real work happens outside the studio and in exchange with other humans.”—DEBORAH KELLY Creating art that explores gender, identity, privilege and power, Deborah Kelly, who is perhaps best known for her cut-and-paste collages, has a peripatetic practice. Her home-base is an apartment in Bronte, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but she is just as likely to be found making work in Darwin or Denmark, and collaboratively online. For our studio visit, we found her at the fishing village of Currarong, New South Wales. Kelly tells us why it was so important for her to have studio space during the pandemic, and she explains how her analogue collages inform her “real works.” These projects, which she describes as “big, epic, multi-part and multidisciplinary,” are, she says,…

Growing up in Colorado, New York-based artist Robin Frohardt was inspired to become a puppeteer not by cute children’s shows but by seeing a couple of puppet shows aimed at adults, including one based on Charles Bukowski poetry about necrophilia. Frohardt was studying painting in school. “I never really knew what I wanted to paint,” she tells me from her home via Zoom. “I saw these really great puppet works for adults and had never seen anything like that before. “I realised with puppetry I didn’t have to pick an art form because I get to write the stories and sculpt the puppets and paint their faces and perform them on stage—and so it’s kind of everything, and I didn’t have to choose.” Frohardt is the creator of the massive…

Andrew Baker Art Dealer www.andrew-baker.com 26 Brookes Street, Bowen Hills, QLD 4006 [Map 15] 07 3252 2292 0412 990 356 Wed to Sat 10am–5pm or by appt. See our website for latest information. Paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures by leading contemporary Australian, Melanesian and Polynesian artists, including: Lincoln Austin, Leonard Brown, Michael Cook, Karla Dickens, Marian Drew, Ruki Famé, Fiona Foley, Stephen Hart, Donna Marcus, Michel Tuffery, Katarina Vesterberg and William Yang. 10 March—24 April Natures Mortes Michael Cook Artspace Mackay www.artspacemackay.com.au Civic Precinct, corner Gordon and Macalister Streets, Mackay, QLD 4740 [Map 14] 07 4961 9722 Tue to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun 10am–3pm. Free entry. See our website for latest information. 4 February—16 May Horizons Tony Druery 19 February—16 May A Changing Ecology Dylan 16 February—12 May The…

Lumen White Rabbit Gallery 6 March—1 August A lumen is a unit of measurement used to describe the relative brightness of light, and Lumen at White Rabbit Gallery does indeed feature a wide range of light-emitting artworks by Chinese artists: photographs on lightboxes, video projections, and immersive installations delineated by green laser beams or strings of coloured LEDs. Although, as curator David Williams points out, Lumen not only showcases light as a medium, it also focuses on the conceptual potential of illumination. Williams highlights Zhang Peili’s 2012 Portraits as a major work in Lumen that uses light as both a material and an idea. Peili’s video installation (which was acquired for White Rabbit in 2020 and has not been on show before) is massive and intense. Projected at 5 ×…

YEDI/SONGS from Patrick William Carter Patrick William Carter Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 21 February—18 April The vibrant multi-disciplinary works of Patrick William Carter are, in their way, love stories: love of family, music, Country and culture. Combining performance and dance with sound, video and painting, Carter, a Noongar artist based in Perth, has established a unique body of work that explores hybrid modes of creation. YEDI/SONGS from Patrick William Carter offers a warm and emotional sample of his recent works. While much of Carter’s work addresses his Indigenous identity, family and community, perhaps the most immediately engaging aspect of his art is not just his innovative toying with media and medium, but his collaborative spirit. With the exhibition including four projected pieces, a new work called WIND, 2021, shows…

Grounded in social justice, Richard Bell’s art is a call to action. It scrutinises settler-nationhood to reveal the corrosive damage made by the colonial state. Through painting, video, text and installation, the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang artist illuminates systemic racism, land injustice and Blak politics—all with humorous attention to the hypocrisies of the art industry itself, and its manipulation of First Nations artists. Through his iconic body of work Bell asserts Indigenous sovereignty, while reminding Anglo Australia that it lives and prospers on stolen land. Reflecting on his practice, Bell shares the stories behind five artworks including recent paintings created for Occurrent Affair at UQ Art Museum, which continue to examine racial inequality. RICHARD BELL: In 2009 to 2011, young Aboriginal people started re-erecting Tent Embassies around Australia…

The atmospheric haze in Clarice Beckett’s paintings has always been imagined as a weather phenomenon—the most exquisite, oppressive fog. The Melbourne artist, who died in 1935, was part of a localised painting movement that banished hard boundaries between objects and the air that surrounds them. Yet curator Tracey Lock, who has brought together Clarice Beckett: The present moment at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), has a different reading: it’s not mist or fog, and it never was—it’s something much more otherworldly. Beckett is one of the few tonal painters—those who captured natural life with a sense of coloured atmosphere or mist—still cherished today, even surpassing the reputation of her teacher, artist Max Meldrum. Now recognised as a leading modernist, she spent her life in Melbourne and its…

ACMI www.acmi.net.au Fed Square, Melbourne, VIC 3000 [Map 2] Mon and Tues 12noon–5pm, Wed to Fri 12noon–7pm, Sat 11am–7pm, Sun 11am–6pm. See our website for more information. Opening 11 February The Story of the Moving Image ACMI’s centrepiece is the interactive free exhibition The Story of the Moving Image. The exhibition traverses time, countries and cultures in a mesmerising exploration of an art form that changed the world. Use our Lens to dive deeper, discover new favourites and inspire your curiosity beyond the museum experience. Five distinct sections frame the major moments in moving image history, including the origins and future of cinema, production design and the creative process, Australian culture and stories, the rise of videogames, and how screens inform, influence and empower us. 11 February–30 May Gabriella Hirst:…

Aarwun Gallery www.aarwungallery.com 11 Federation Square, Gold Creek, Nicholls, ACT 2913 [Map 16] 02 6230 2055 Daily 10am–5pm and by appointment in the evening. See our website for latest information. Opening 27 March Autumn exhibition Artists Shed www.artistsshed.com.au 1–3/88 Wollongong Street (lower), Fyshwick, ACT 2609 0418 237 766 Open daily 9am–5pm, Sun 10am–4pm. Canberra’s largest private gallery. Exhibiting the fine art of Margaret Hadfield-Zorgdrager on a permanent basis and also a large collection of antique and preloved artworks which have been collected in response to the discarding of our culture. Folk Art, needlework, Marquetry are all appreciated here. This privately run gallery is a celebration of Australian history and culture through art. In the heart of industrial Canberra. Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery www.anca.net.au 1 Rosevear Place (corner Antill…

ACE Open www.aceopen.art Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8211 7505 Tue to Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 10am–5pm. As South Australia’s flagship contemporary art gallery, ACE Open presents a year-round program of free exhibitions by practicing South Australian, Australian and international artists. Its exhibitions, talks and events are held at its Lion Arts Centre home in the west end of the city. In name and nature, ACE Open forges the future with an approach that is flexible and constantly evolving, placing values of ambition, integrity, openness and criticality at its core. 26 February—24 April The Image Is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives) The exhibition will present new and existing work in a range of material forms by over 20 artists from Australia, the…