Innholdsfortegnelse for 31 i Artist Profile

THE AP TEAM EDITOR Owen Craven ocraven@nextmedia.com.au ART DIRECTOR Vincent Rommelaere vrommelaere@nextmedia.com.au EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Lucy Stranger artistprofi le@nextmedia.com.au SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith CONTRIBUTORS KATY PRESTON is an arts writer and curator. She holds a Bachelor of Art Theory and a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) from the University of New South Wales, and a Master of Arts (Research) in Art History from the University of Sydney. She currently teaches at the University of Sydney and previously held the role of assistant curator at the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery. ELIZABETH FORTESCUE is a visual arts writer for the Daily Telegraph, Australian correspondent for The Art Newspaper; and founder and author of www.artwriter.com.au LUCY STRANGER is an arts writer and Art History Honours student at the University of Sydney. She is Editorial Coordinator…

WITH THE AIM of creating an accessible online collection of art and other cultural archives worldwide, the Google Cultural Institute is already well established across the globe. Earlier this year, in March, the initiative gained momentum as 14 leading Australian museums and cultural organisations joined the Institute, an important step in the digitisation of arts and culture in Australia. The Institute already includes the likes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Tate Modern, and now the National Museum of Australia, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others, are starting to digitise their collections. These organisations recognised the opportunity for Australian collections to be preserved as part of the greater global cultural community. So far more than 2000 items,…

DAVID LYNCH IS internationally renowned as a filmmaker, the lauded director of an eccentric cinematic oeuvre. His surreal and distinct cinematic style is evident in works such as Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001) and the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91). However, Lynch originally began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography and drawing. Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) presents David Lynch: Between Two Worlds, a 50-year retrospective that considers the auteur’s artistic practice. Developed closely with the artist, the exhibition features more than 200 works and is organised around three themes, which also permeate Lynch’s cinematography: ‘Man and machine’, ‘The extra-ordinary’, and ‘Psychic Aches’. The exhibition’s curator, José Da Silva, Senior…

GO EAST PRESENTS a rare opportunity to view significant contemporary Asian artworks from the private collection of Australian philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman, who have passionately built their art collection for more than 25 years. This collection of provocative and compelling works weaves a rich tapestry of different histories, speaking to one another of coexisting, often-times colliding worlds. The works reflect the Shermans’ long-standing fascination with art built around text and textiles, and their commitment to works that address issues of social justice. Featuring artists from China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet and Vietnam, Go East represents a new undertaking for Gene and Brian Sherman, who are providing broad access to their contemporary Asian art collection for the first time. Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand…

A RECENT DOCUMENTARY opens up a personal history about the actor Robert De Niro and his father that not many have been privy to. Robert De Niro discussed his father, Robert De Niro Sr (1922-1993), whose artistic coming of age, sadly, was not realised while he was alive. The HBO documentary Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro Sr explores the relationship between father and son, and the wealth of artistic talent that the De Niro name carries. A great artist, father of actor Robert De Niro, Robert De Niro Sr’s story is one of an artist who falls victim to the familiar syndrome of those only receiving true recognition after their passing. Led by his son Robert De Niro, the documentary is an insightful account of his father’s struggles to…

STIEG PERSSON’S treatment of the language of painting and, importantly, the treatment of language, constructs a field of engagement that delights in the pleasures of reading. It’s not just the simplistic decoding of letters and sentences but the manner of the curving line in a vowel sound, the pregnant pause between phrasing, and the urgency of communication manifested with haste on a surface that is both loaded and spacious. Persson is a known presence on the Australian art landscape and a well-respected one. Beginning as a bright rising star, his ascendancy was propelled through acquisitions of his work by international collections, not least of which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A consistent thread running through his oeuvre is his treatment of text. Persson explains that “the use…

“Travelling gave me first-hand exposure to both traditional and contemporary artistic patterns and how they are used within different cultures. CONVERSATIONS ARE FUNDAMENTAL to my art-making and I seek to communicate ideas rather than create an homogenous style. I am interested in the stimulus and symbolic meaning of colour and pattern and I use them within my drawing, printmaking and textile-based artworks to explore the idea of identity – whether it be a person, culture or place. I am also very interested in the idea of the ‘double-take’ and drawing in the viewer to explore more nuanced subtexts. The preoccupation with identity emerged and developed while I was living in Sweden between 1996 and 2011 – initially as a foreigner and then as a naturalised Swede. My travels to South…

THE BULGARI ART Award is a major, $80,000 annual award to support contemporary Australian painting, and for 2015 it has been won by Ildiko Kovacs for her work, ‘Onda’. Each year, the Art Gallery of NSW identifies a significant painting by a mid-career Australian artist to be acquired for the collection. The award, sponsored by Bulgari, consists of $50,000 for acquisition of the painting and a residency for the artist in Italy valued at $30,000. The total award of $80,000 makes it one of the most valuable art awards in Australia. Discussing ‘Onda’, her winning work for 2015, Ildiko Kovacs highlighted the source inspiration, saying “Onda means ‘wave’ in Italian. My studio is close to the ocean and the sound of the waves is ever present.” Head Curator of Australian…

Photographer Roger Ballen, using the same Rolleifl ex black and white fi lm camera for the last 30 years, has created a vivid, imagined, sometimes disconcerting world fi lled with images of wild animals and people at the very margins of society – many of which he says are, in a way, self portraits. Sometimes the difference between a great shot and a bad shot in a lot of my photographs is just where the eyelid is on a blink, that’s what makes the picture. INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, since the 1970s. Ballen’s striking black and white photographs are constructed in a unique manner blending performance, drawing and sculpture. He combines subjects and objects within…

ESTABLISHING A SUCCESSFUL career over the past 20 years, painter Angus McDonald is an artist who places his trust in the artmaking process, rather than trying to intellectualise the meaning behind his ideas. He seamlessly integrates the use of photography with traditional painting methods, transforming the photograph into a tool that allows him to create large-scale works that are both dramatic and complex. McDonald is currently working on his upcoming exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery, titled Deluge. Investigating themes of loss, beauty, love and cycles of existence within this new exhibition, he is stepping into new and uncharted territory in his own practice by using the same core imagery to create both figurative realist and abstract artworks to be exhibited collectively. In preparation, McDonald has immersed himself in his Lennox…

Hayden Fowler’s Your Death is a new photographic series documenting an ongoing performance project in which the artist submits his own body in a poignant remembrance of New Zealand’s catastrophic bird extinctions. Over three sessions during Sydney’s Art Month in March this year, in a street-front window, Fowler’s torso was tattooed with an image of the South Island Kkako – last sighted in 1967 and officially declared extinct in 2004. In June 2014 the project was undertaken in Berlin, where the extinct Whekau, or Laughing Owl, was tattooed in flight across his chest, commemorating the 100th anniversary of its disappearance. Each event was choreographed over three sessions, irreversibly transforming Fowler’s skin into a conjunction of living bodies. Your Death continues a project the artist began in Auckland in 2007, where…

JAMES TURRELL USES light and colour as his art materials, and this survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra presents work from every decade of his 50-year career. National Gallery of Australia Director, Dr Gerard Vaughan, declares “James Turrell is one of the most fascinating artists of our time and Australians have never before seen an exhibition like this.” James Turrell: a retrospective brings together projection pieces, built spaces, holograms, drawings, prints and photographs. It celebrates Skyspaces, viewing chambers that affect our perception of the sky, and surveys Turrell’s major work, an ongoing project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert in Arizona. At Roden Crater, Turrel has created a “naked eye observatory” of multiple viewing chambers, fascinating interior spaces in…

IN TRYING TO fathom the connection between nature and existence, and our current struggle to find a sustainable relationship with our environment, it has become apparent to me that I suffer from what 17th-century English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon called “a mystified incomprehension that science alone cannot cure”. When I think about observation I sense there is a greater connection between subject and observer than my eyes can fathom. Through my art practice I have begun to glean that there is a conceptual component to sight where just by thinking about observation we are able to challenge and alter what we see. Einstein described it as the intuitive “feeling for the order lying behind the appearance”. My most recent body of work is a vision quest into making ‘blind spots’…