Artist Profile

Two important firsts happened in Australasia in April for Indigenous artists worldwide. Archie Moore’s exhibition kith and kin at the Australia Pavilion and Mataaho Collective’s installation Takapau, in the main exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreign

World Emoji Day will be celebrated on 17 July 2024. As we all think about how to mark this increasingly significant annual event, it is timely to consider how emoji have entered the legal landscape. A recent legal precedent from Canada demonstrates t

I meet with Christopher Bassi in his studio on infamous Boundary Street (the former margin of Magandjin / Brisbane’s once segregated city limits). It is well-lit and crisp white—flanked by large canvases in gradating stages of completion and a desk w

Julie Rrap was in her late teens and living in a share house in South Brisbane when she and a group of friends took magic mushrooms. An image she hallucinated while studying her reflection in a glass windowpane at night has never left her. It was the

Lee Ufan was born in 1936 in South Korea and studied calligraphy, poetry, and painting from an early age, and later philosophy at the Seoul National University. He moved to Japan in his early twenties and continued his studies at Nihon University, To

The past several years have seen numerous protests and acts of vandalism directed against public monuments deemed to be offensive, particularly during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 sparked by the death of George Floyd (1973-2020) in the Uni

I met with Gary Deirmendjian in his studio, or one aspect of it at least, at a café in Sydney’s Kings Cross. He is self-described as an “urban animal,” and the streets form a diorama and the source for his creations. Consequently, Deirmendjian’s arti

In a world dominated by linguistic communication, Ebony Truscott feels more at home in the elusive realm of visual and tactile sensation. She prefaces our conversation by saying, “I feel like I can be more eloquent in my art than in spoken language,

In an autumn downpour I arrive at the Annandale studio of Susie Choi. The rain seems to rattle the bones of the old warehouse space, which is shared with fellow artists Glenn Barkley and Mechelle Bounpraseuth. Choi is painting colourful stripes on a

In the early 1990s, while Syed was immersed in the dual pursuit of a Bachelor of Applied Chemistry and Bachelor of Commerce in Karachi, a generation of students were training under the teachings of painter and sculptor Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq (1941-1999) an

Nicola Moss’ home-studio sits at the top of an alarmingly steep, twisting driveway overlooking a peaceful, hidden valley in the Gold Coast Hinterland. Just minutes from the ever-growing suburban sprawl of the city’s northern suburbs, this old dairy f

My artistic practice revolves around the metaphor of staining, a process that mirrors the intricate nuances of trauma and healing. The method of staining connects to moments that left indelible marks on the fabric of my being. Trauma, with its invisi

Since when did any commercial art gallery offer “surgery hours?” Since Hughes at Olsen opened in Sydney on May 1, that’s when. Every Friday between 10 a.m. and noon, Evan Hughes will be ready and willing to speak to artists and art students who can s

As many artists of his generation experienced, if as a student you showed the slightest creative inclination but also demonstrated academic ability you were funnelled by the school guidance counsellor into an architecture degree: if you were, God for

Before it was publicly announced in February 2023 that X Zhu-Nowell would take the reins as artistic director at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), the thirty-four year old curator asked members of the local art community what they thought about t

It was the silence that got me. It was uncanny. As if I’d crossed an invisible portal into another world. A few minutes before I’d been on Melbourne’s Johnston Street, with its heavy trucks, orange commuter buses, crowded pavements, hipster gin palac

Landscape has been a dominant force in Australian art since colonial times, a place for myth and legend to play out, the supreme example being Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, 1946-47, where human and landscape meld and morph into one mythic dreaming

History and identity are the main themes of this BoS, with a focus on LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous issues as well as climate change, colonisation, the horrors of war, and the atomic age. The curators bring an enthusiasm to the project and have tried to cr

Zoe Grey’s relationship to her hometown of Marrawah, on Tasmania’s west coast, has long informed her art-making. Her upcoming exhibition at Despard Gallery in Hobart Could You Ever Know Every Fold in the Mountain? continues her exploration of memory

Dale Frank: Growers and Showers at the National Art School Galleries is more than enough. Even the catalogue essay by Wes Hill grants that the works are "visually too much at times." Perhaps the mystical and proto-psychedelic William Blake could be c

The title of Judy Watson’s forty-year survey at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is from a poem written by her son Otis Carmichael in Waanyi language, and translates as “tomorrow the tree grows stronger.” In this context it underlines a central threa

Biennials, or biennales, are no mean feat—for curators, artists, host institutions, and audiences. The challenge lies in the delicate dance of marrying a cohesive curatorial theme with the artists selected, balancing the practical aspects of the gall

The screenwriter and film director David Roach, a Clifton local, discovered a photograph of the late Ian Gentle (1945–2009) in the Clifton School of Arts (CSA) archives. In the photograph, Gentle is sitting in a room at the CSA, where he lived and ha

The outpouring of universal grief prompted by Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, has reverberated throughout the world as one of the most powerful anti-war statements since its making in April 1937. Cubism’s most shattering image artistically

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In Mothers, Fathers Jelena Telecki deftly handles the complexity of her exhibition’s perennial, titular subjects—parenthood, childhood, ancestry, and inheritance. Her first solo exhibition at a major Australian gallery is a haunting exploration of un

Between 1880 and 1925, Paris was reinventing itself as a modern city. The process had commenced somewhat earlier, when under Napoleon III (1848-1870) and his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the heart of old Paris was ripped out. Betwe

Enter the main gallery at Wollongong Art Gallery and you will immediately notice the energetic and dense Beach combing South Coast, 2023, by Suzanne Archer on the back wall. You’d be forgiven for marching straight down the centre of the room to get a

A dam Douglas Hill, better known by his longstanding moniker Blak Douglas, is an Indigenous artist with strong connections to Western Sydney and the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. This is important to preface, as the documentary’s provocative title,

Irene Barberis’ work ranges from the monumental The Tapestry of Light, 2006-2019, which combines nanotechnology with Christian apocalyptic imagery, to a variety of minimalist chromatic and formal statements characterised by a conceptual rigor. These