Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 64 i Artist Profile

Brent Harris, our cover artist, will expand our experience of painting and art history. Few artists can boast such qualities as Brent. Artist and writer Peter Hill has eloquently provided us the opportunity to see Brent’s work and life, so that we feel a part of the conversation. When a major survey of a living artist by important museums and galleries occurs, as it has for Brent with exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery, TarraWarra Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, there is a hopeful expectation that more such surveys will continue. Brent’s issue of Artist Profile will be presented at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. As we have for three consecutive Art Fairs, we’re continuing our major sponsorship in Australasia’s largest presentations of artists and their galleries.…

It’s a cold winter’s day when I visit Michael Schlitz’s studio in Tasmania’s Huon Valley. Dampness hangs in the air, but in the artist’s hand-built hut is a welcoming fire and cups of tea. The kettle boils on the woodfire stove while we talk. Without the fire, Schlitz warns, its brutally cold and draughty. I don’t doubt it. Condensation clings to the windows, blurring the view of ferns and gumtrees outside. The Celery Top Pine was salvaged from the closed mill in Huonville; I run my hand along the windowsill, feeling the knots and curves of the tree. Like his artworks, the building is simple, raw, and celebrates the handmade. Imperfections are something to be celebrated, Schlitz remarks, “sometimes the imperfections are the exciting part of the image. Everything I…

Renee So’s faces don’t often have all their features. Some have noses, but her early busts and knitted paintings often have mouths grown over by facial (or head) hair. Many wear masks, covering almost every detail which would give a hint of their character. “But they always have eyes,” she says. Like these characters, So’s body of work itself emphasises the eyes – or, at least, the visual. It metabolises an enormous swathe of visible data, drawn largely from museum collections in London, where she has lived since 2005. So’s project is sometimes described as “bringing to light” the stories held within the objects she observes, or else offering a critical perspective on the dominating histories told by the institutions that display them. These are histories of extraction and exploitation…

“I panicked, thought what if I can’t make anything ever again? I’d had tough moments – a divorce, losing my mum – but the space I was in this time was frightening. I said to myself, ‘I’ve got a show next year, I have responsibilities to my practice, my gallery.’” The artist is recounting that moment and in the telling, her fear is palpable. We’re sitting having tea and lemon butter cake at Cawthorn’s kitchen bench, Maggie the whippet is circling for crumbs. There is a wall of art, on one side, paintings by Timothy Cook, Idris Murphy, a line of soft sculptures by Cawthorn arranged along the lid of the piano. There is a huge wooden not-for-the-faint-hearted ladder that leads to loft sleeping quarters. On the adjacent wall an…

The place was packed. Artist Godwin Bradbeer, as part of his current exhibition, was giving a public demonstration of his very personal method of making drawings that are almost paintings, and paintings that are almost drawings. “All these artworks are drawn in what was once called freehand, in graphite and waxed chinagraph pencil,” he told the crowd. “At different stages, the drawings have been burnished with the sort of spoons you would find in any old cutlery drawer …” Gallery Director Jessica Velasquez came across to me, standing at the back of the throng, and whispered “We’ve got over seventy people here, we’ve had to close the doors!” The punters were fascinated! I don’t know why galleries and museums don’t do this more often. Later, knowing the gallery’s twenty-year anniversary…

This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale will go down in exhibition history as a watershed moment for the industry. With the prompt-as-title “The Laboratory of the Future,” Lesley Lokko, the Ghanaian-Scottish curator of this year’s event – and the first architect of African descent to hold the position – has selected a theme that challenges the traditional ways in which architecture, as a practice stemming from a western lineage, is conceived, presented and discussed. Instead, she has shifted the focus to the African continent – as a geographical place but also as a perspective, a world view – in which young architectural practices abound that rethink the built environment in ways that are non-extractive, decolonial, solution-driven, and climate-aware. The most noticeable departures from previous iterations in the biennale’s central exhibition are…

Ömie barkcloth: Pathways of nioge is currently on display on the fourth floor of the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. Upon entering the gallery space, one is met with a black title wall, and illuminating the text design, is a creative and understated use of exhibition lighting. It is employed throughout the entirety of the exhibition, giving one the immersive feeling of almost being situated within the shadows, and silhouettes of the rainforest highlands of Northern (Oro) Province, Papua New Guinea. The Ömie people are a distinct cultural group with their own language; a population of around two thousand lives in a series of seven main villages and many more hamlets. Their region in the Mount Lamington Huvaemo, and Mount Obo foothills – close to Kokoda – is…

Sending shockwaves of subject matter into the room, eX de Medici’s Beautiful Wickedness exhibition of exquisite detailed work is magnificently complex. Carefree and bold, Michael Zavros’ The Favourite takes us from graduation to the stand-out commission of the exhibition Drowned Mercedes, 2023. Meticulous painters, both artists are working at the intersection between what is seen and what is perceived, with a photo realist quality to their work that each subverts to deliver the unreal. For each there is the truism of the arts, that you have to know the rules before you can break them. And break them they do, with colours, and form. Taking the title for this exhibition from her work Beautiful Wickedness of 2005, de Medici’s world is suffused with the excesses of consumer luxury, opulence, and…

For each artwork, she constructs fictitious personas, notable for their uncanny artifice. It’s by means of these ambiguous characters and their uneasy actions, that Panegyres works through themes of personal trauma, memory, and social commentary. Her art consequently moves between the darkly comedic and disturbing, cultivating an unnerving mix of tension and pathos. In discussing her creative approach, Panegyres underscores that she avoids a hightech aesthetic. This reflects her aim of “resisting the glossy appearance associated with commodified art and visual culture in capitalism.” By analysing three works of the artist, we can see how the result makes for affective, cogent performances. In I’ve Always Wanted to be a Fucking Ballerina, 2018, Panegyres performed for 2.5 hours as a ballerina to a cacophonous soundtrack she created from distorted fragments of…

Brent Harris’ studio is adjacent to Gertrude Glasshouse, the experimental satellite venue of Gertrude Contemporary. Apart from chance meetings at Tolarno Galleries openings, we haven’t really had much chance to talk since we were both doing residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 1994. We climb the stairs to his studio – and he points out the adjoining ground floor studio of his partner, Andrew Browne. This year going into next is an incredibly busy one for this artist, and as we ascend he lists major shows in Auckland Art Gallery, TarraWarra Museum of Art, The Art Gallery of South Australia, and Robert Heald Gallery in Wellington. The studio is awash with light. Brushes, paint, empty anchovy and tuna tins as palettes. There is no shortage of art…

At this time of day, there’s not much natural light in Erin Mison’s small, square studio on the second floor of her home in Mount Keira, Wollongong. A single lamp in the corner – not unlike the lamps you find in some of her work – casts a yellow glow against the muted reds, greens, and ochres of her unfinished rugs. Small sketches ripped from notebooks are taped to one wall. On the wall opposite, hundreds of skeins of yarn, coordinated by the artist’s own appreciation of colour, wait their turn. Taking a popular DIY trend and elevating it to an artistic medium, Mison uses tufting guns in ways not often seen in contemporary Australian art. She tufts rugs in a bold style that blends portraiture and storytelling. Her work…

Looking back over my artistic practice, I can clearly see the signposts leading to what I’m making in the studio today. In recent years, I have been playing with cycles of creation and destruction: casting my body in gypsum and concrete, smashing these casts into pieces, and reforming them into new sculptural forms to be cast once again. Having worked with my own body for two decades, I now realise this moment was a gradual process of disappearing my body while hiding it in plain sight, like a magician slowly vanishing from the stage. I am gradually moving away from figurative work (physical or photographic) towards non-representational forms, and I’m enjoying the mystery, play, and discovery of sculptural materiality. Recently I was invited by Artereal, my commercial gallery in Sydney,…

“What kinds of problems and what kinds of meanings happen in paint? What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting? … This is where alchemy can help because it is the most developed language for thinking in substances and processes.” – James Elkins, What Painting Is I have the pleasure of catching glimpses of Kat’s work as it evolves, in her studio next door to mine. There is comfort in knowing that on the other side of a wall, another soul is grappling with materials, processes, and ideas. Some mornings we sit on our sunlit stairs and exchange words of wisdom and frustration, before returning to the furnace with a mutual understanding that words and ideas can only offer so much – the rest is persistence and…

The exhibition title Shapes For Gods is taken from the painting of the same name. It is the pivotal work amongst a field of twenty-three figurative paintings, a print and a drawing. Shapes For Gods is Lopes’ fourth solo exhibition at Mitchell Fine Art and follows last year’s Encountered, a twenty-five-year survey (which this writer curated) at Orange Regional Gallery and S.H. Ervin Gallery. There is a continuum between Shapes For Gods and Encountered, with the inclusion of the outstanding painting Figure with Horse Icon, 2022-23, which Lopes has slightly reworked from Encountered by sharpening the formal elements. He has also included the complex Still Life – Reaching, 2022 in this show. The inclusion of both adds a dominant presence of still-life paintings. It highlights that the artist has tilted…

Generally, the display of major exhibitions at Australian public art galleries does not go beyond the choice of colour for the walls and adjustments to the lighting. By contrast, the NGV commissioned the well-known Paris-based architect and designer India Mahdavi to enter into a collaborative dialogue with Bonnard. She has designed decorative painted stage sets, screens, special wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings, in the form of the exhibition’s scenography, to create a unique viewing experience. Mahdavi has generally sampled ornamental patterns or figurative motifs discovered in Bonnard’s paintings, and then employed them on a monumental scale. We move through three conceptual parts of the exhibition – initially the landscapes with the different floating elements, then domesticity with views from a much-loved interior space, and finally le Midi (the South of France)…

In 1991, Maurice and Katia Krafft died during the Mount Unzen eruption on Japan’s island of Kyushu. Herzog’s documentary does meditate on their deaths and the notion of “impending doom,” but his concerns are the Kraffts' humanity and their mythic imagery. He is not interested the couple as people per se – their lives are already abundantly documented. Paradoxically for a film scant on personal details, one cannot substantially discuss the film without discussing Herzog. Herzog himself has visited active volcanoes before to capture their power, and he has risked his life in other ways too. Once Herzog was shot during an interview with the BBC. After relocating, Herzog insisted on carrying on with the interview, since “It’s not a significant bullet.” The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and…

Time is central to the art of Lyndal Jones. Working with durational practice, her installations include video, performance, theatre, dance, photography, and sound. Encounters with her projects unfold; her audiences navigate immersive experiences that capture layered processes of making and accumulation of meaning derived from extended exchanges with subjects and subject. Jones identifies the nascent roots of this way of working in her experiences with feminism in the 1970s. “I was introduced to Laura Mulvey’s ideas at the London Filmmaker’s Co-Op. When Laura later wrote about [the male gaze] I thought ‘This condemns me to silence forever! There has to be another way.’ … I experimented with duration and the inclusion of often contradictory or incomplete stories in an attempt to find a creative process where it was possible to…

The ambitious scale of Aflame deepens Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s interrogation of the Ādittapariyāya Sutta (Pali, “Fire Sermon Discourse”) in Theravada Buddhism and ventures into new technologies. In the Fire Sermon, Buddha preaches about achieving liberation from suffering through detachment from the five senses and the mind. Buddha states that the Five Senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste) and the mind are in a state of burning – burning with desire, attachment, and clinging. In Aflame, Vongpoothorn materially explores “why is it all burning up?” “As humans, our actions have a direct correlation to the burning of the world around us.” She notes the burning of the internal senses, such as desire and attachment are “a metaphor for everything that is going on [such as] the toxicity in the environment and…

all the women. in me. are tired. –Nayyirah Waheed The first text that you read, under the moniker “Opening Gambit,” features a quote from Hannah Gadsby: “Picasso said, ‘You can have all the perspectives at once!’ What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested.” What follows throughout the show is a variety of (mostly) women’s perspectives. Unsurprisingly, since “women” is hardly a homogenous and coherent category in itself, these perspectives don’t all align or agree. There are a lot of works that – as some critics have lamented – don’t appear to have a lot to do with one another, or all that much to do with Picasso. And certainly, this exhibition is not visually elegant; it feels cramped and…

In a commitment to bolster LGBTIQA+ visibility and offer more supportive conditions for growing up queer in regional Queensland – and regional Australia more generally – the Rockhampton Museum of Art (RMOA), Darumbal country, has held recent exhibitions. One exhibition is Welcome to Paradise by trans-identifying conceptual artist Easton Dunne, and the other is queer painter Cutler Footway’s From a Burdekin Studio. Cutler Footway, otherwise known as the art critic Bruce James, grew up in the sugar town of Ayre in Central Queensland in the 1950’s and 1960s. While millennials (like me) opt for the slashie career; i.e., curator/artist/writer, Footway seems completely to have separated his writing practice from his visual art practice. Following a dormant period of some decades, Footway, the winner of the 2020 Percival Portrait Painting Prize,…

Are You There? surveys three decades of the artist’s prolific creativity in performance video, photographs, text, and archival material. Curated by James Gatt, and articulated within one double-height space at Wollongong Art Gallery, the exhibition is a vibrant and thought-provoking experience of self and queer identity, rich with emotional connections, trauma, loss and healing, sexuality, death, relationships, family, and friends. Cunningham is well known as a Sydney-based curator and writer; his projects with contemporary Australian artists for Carriageworks and Artbank have been consistently rigorous and memorable. Hence, this survey of his thirty-year career as an artist is both enlightening and rewarding. As James Gatt remarks in the exhibition essay, Cunningham developed an astute writing practice in his early years, composing poems and stories, and tracking his inner-most thoughts in a…