Innehållsförteckning för May/June 2023 från Art Guide Australia

TIMMAH BALL is a writer of Ballardong Noongar heritage who is influenced by studying and working in the field of urban planning. Her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary journals. OSLO DAVIS is an illustrator, cartoonist and artist who has drawn for The New York Times, The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, SBS and The Guardian, as well as the National Gallery of Victoria, Golden Plains and State Library Victoria, among many others. Oslo’s latest book is Overheard: The Art of Eavesdropping. STEVE DOW is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer, whose profiles, essays, previews and reviews range across the visual arts, theatre, film and television for The Saturday Paper, The Guardian, The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Sunday Life, Limelight and VAULT. BRIONY DOWNES is…

The Favourite Michael Zavros Queensland Art Gallery 24 June—2 October “Jeff Koons says ‘embrace your past’,” cites Michael Zavros. “I think I’m good at that.” Brisbane-based Zavros, arguably one of Australia’s most celebrated artists of the last decade, has been dissecting his personal and artistic history for the most significant exhibition of his career: The Favourite. The survey show features works dating back to 1999, and naturally includes many of his signature photorealist paintings with their startlingly resonant detail, as well as sculptures, video works, photography and hybrid pieces. For Zavros, a central work in the exhibition is his provocative painting Phoebe Is Dead/McQueen, 2010, which shows his five-year-old daughter ‘playing dead’, covered with an Alexander McQueen scarf. It won the Doug Moran Portrait Prize that year. This piece is…

Yasmin Smith Mosman Art Gallery 17 June—10 September Yasmin Smith examines plants as time-honoured witnesses of Country, story and people. Since 2014 she’s been building ceramic archives, casting replicas of plants in clay and glazing them with the ash of the original specimens. Since the ash is laboratory-tested to uncover the plant’s biological makeup, the resulting glaze speaks to the plant’s history. What affects this process, Smith explains, is “deep geological time” and “human intervention”. At Mosman Art Gallery, Smith has collected Angophora costata, a native tree commonly known as the smooth-barked apple, which is grown around Booragy (Bradleys Head). It’s collected through a collaboration with Harbour Trust, a government body rehabilitating land around Sydney Harbour. Smith also amassed wrack (washed-off kelp), collected from the local shores of Koree (Chowder…

Bee-stung lips: Barbara Hanrahan Works on paper 1960-1991 Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery Until 21 May Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery 2 June—16 July The visual language of Barbara Hanrahan (1939–1991) is both bold and delicate. Working widely across the print medium, including woodcuts, linocuts, screenprints, lithographs, etchings and drypoint, Hanrahan explores sex, beauty, domesticity, nature, celestial bodies, and the afterlife, in her very personal yet distinctly universal images. While the Adelaide-born artist’s own life was cut short in 1991, her career as a printmaker was extensive and prolific, spanning 30 of the artist’s 52 years. Beestung lips, an exhibition created by Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA), is touring nationally, with 74 of Hanrahan’s prints from the entirety of her career shown at regional galleries across Australia. “This exhibition is…

The Birrarung (Yarra) River was a gathering place for the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation from time immemorial. And yet for a comparatively short 169 years the river’s south bank has been the home of Australia’s first railway station, Flinders St. Opening in 1854 and initially known as Melbourne Terminus, it’s a complicated site of colonial history and contemporary commuter congregation. Now, the station’s upper levels are having a spiritual transformation. Above the famous clocks in the main building, in grand old rooms completed in 1909 but sealed off to the public and only reopened recently, are First Peoples’ connections to the spirit world, Country, metaphysics and memory. Transported multiple stories above the commuter and city bustle, linear time is left behind in Shadow Spirit. An ambitious exhibition, Shadow…

19 Karen Contemporary Artspace 19karen.com.au 19 Karen Avenue, Mermaid Beach, Gold Coast, QLD 4218 [Map 13] 07 5554 5019 Tues to Thurs 10am–5pm, Fri and Sat 10am–2pm. Mini Solo Shows Showcasing a small body of work from a selection of Australian and International artists. From 15 July Mini Solo Show 3 Beau B Frank (USA) Philip Bosmans (Belgium) Yool Kim (Korea) Josias Figuerido (Spain/USA) Alburoto (Philippines) Artspace Mackay artspacemackay.com.au Civic Precinct, corner Gordon and Macalister Streets, Mackay, QLD 4740 [Map 14] 07 4961 9722 Tue to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat and Sun 10am–3pm. Free entry. 17 February—14 May Colourful Expressions Davida Allen 11 February—7 May Summer of the Seventeenth Doll Glen Skien 17 February—7 May M is for Madraseh (School) Deanna Hitti 11 February—11 May Focus on the Collection: Great Australian…

I first came across Mia Boe’s paintings of elongated figures a few years ago. I was dazzled by their angular composition and vivid colour, and then chastened by the colonial histories these paintings speak to—which Boe, our cover artist for this issue, discusses in our profile. Reflecting on buried histories is today an important revisionism within many art practices, and this powerfully comes through in Timmah Ball’s interview with Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones, whose latest work at the National Gallery of Australia is exploring how Indigenous cultures undertook breadmaking practices dating back 32,000 years—long before Western food production processes. And yet Jones poignantly questions if people understand what this truly means. Revisionist histories also define many current exhibitions, and we profile Philippa Cullen, an artist active in the…

Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi National Gallery of Victoria 9 June—8 October Perhaps you know Pierre Bonnard for his vivid, emotive displays of landscapes and interior settings, luminous with colour. Or his women walking with parasols, cast within an Impressionistic, refined haze. Maybe it’s the intimate portraits of Marthe, his wife and muse. This winter the National Gallery of Victoria will host such images with Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi. Bonnard (1867-1947) was a leading French painter, illustrator and printmaker, and founding member of the post-impressionist group ‘Les Nabis’. Celebrated for his use of colour to convey emotion, he captured landscapes, urban sites, portraits and intimate domestic scenes. Interestingly, Bonnard did not want his works to be presented in a white cube environment. Miranda Wallace, a senior curator…

Reach Out to The Moon, Even If We Can’t Yoshitomo Nara Art Gallery of Western Australia Until 25 June The first solo exhibition in Australia from Yoshitomo Nara can be regarded as the culmination of an artist resurrecting his practice after tragedy. In 2011, Nara witnessed his hometown of Fukushima, Japan, endure the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, along with the subsequent nuclear meltdown in the city. This trauma greatly affected Nara—whose large paintings and sculptures of children’s heads have been iconic across the world since the 1990s—leaving him blocked artistically. His overwhelming sense of helplessness made creating seem futile. “The initial shock of the events and their human and environmental impacts saw Nara radically question the purpose of his practice,” says Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) curator Robert Cook.…

OH MY GODDESS Adrienne Doig Martin Browne Contemporary 27 April—20 May On a recent trip to Italy, Katoomba-based textile artist Adrienne Doig spent time at the Paolo Orsi Archaeological Museum in Syracuse. While there, she became fascinated with small ancient statues of Greek goddesses clustered together in large groups. Within each group were multiple versions of the same goddess, all slightly different in their execution. “It was in the repetition that things got really interesting for me,” Doig explains. “When there is just one or two, they’re lovely little objects, but when you see hundreds of these figures en masse—all quirky and handmade—their power becomes much greater.” An artist whose practice focuses on textiles and self-portraiture, upon return to Australia Doig began creating doll-like figures of herself reimagined as a…

When Los Angeles-based photographer Catherine Opie was eight years old, she completed a school assignment on early 20th century American photographer Lewis Hine. Soon after, she requested a camera for her ninth birthday. She has been photographing the world around her ever since. Family, friends and community have remained consistent subjects in her visuals, and it is this desire to document community and the constructs of identity that endures as a staple of her photographic practice. For over 30 years, Opie has been amassing an immense oeuvre covering queer portraiture, ceramics, abstract landscapes, collage, documentary photography and film. Providing visual commentary on the American cultural landscape with photographic series devoted to urban mini-malls, butch lesbian communities, Los Angeles freeways and Californian surf culture, Opie focuses predominantly on marginalised communities and…

Art museum curators work with works of art: foregrounding their particular qualities, putting works into telling juxtapositions, and revealing contexts. Often this curatorial work is done in dialogue with the artists themselves. But what happens when the emphasis of an exhibition is actual recorded dialogues—interviews—with living artists? When works of art are only part of the mix, rather than the focus? A current exhibition I’ve curated, Meet the artists: From the James C. Sourris AM Collection of Artist Interviews, now at the State Library of Queensland, features interviews with prominent artists and art figures, undertaken by various curators, academics and arts writers, alongside artwork and reference paraphernalia. Yet it posed specific curatorial challenges: how to work in an actual gallery setting with filmed interviews usually seen online? How to underscore…

James Street, McClelland Drive, Flinders Lane, Gertrude Street, Sturt Street, Federation Square, Dodds Street, Punt Road, Rokeby Street, Lyttleton Street, Dunns Road, Nicholson Street, Willis Street, Abbotsford Street, Little Malop Street, Tinning Street, Cureton Avenue, Alma Road, Langford Street, Lydiard Street North, Albert Street, Horseshoe Bend, Bourke Street, Whitehorse Road, Vere Street, Barkers Road, Roberts Avenue, Templestowe Road, Church Street ACAE Gallery acaearts.com.au Australasian Cultural Arts Exchange 82A Wellington Street, Collingwood, VIC 3066 [Map 3] 0406 711 378 Tue to Sun 10am–5pm. See our website for latest information. 6 April—21 May Why You Like This Angie Pai In her new body of textile works and video works, Taiwan born artist Angie Pai reflects on ancestral values and inheritances through the lens of Asian philosophy and spirituality. ACMI acmi.net.au Fed Square,…

Aarwun Gallery aarwungallery.com.au 11 Federation Square, Gold Creek, Nicholls, ACT 2913 [Map 16] 0499 107 887 Daily 10am–4.30pm and by appointment in the evening. 5 May—28 May A whole other story John A Rowe Artists Shed artistshed.com.au 1–3/88 Wollongong Street (lower), Fyshwick, ACT 2609 0418 237 766 Tues to Sat 9am–5pm, Sun 10am–4pm. A private gallery by award winning artist Margaret Hadfield. The ‘Shed’ is a resourceful arts business with quality art materials, art school, gallery, and a music venue space. Margaret’s works are on display with local and ‘Shed Artists’ as well. Margaret paints in most mediums and the gallery features her works on military history, Antarctica and Australian landscapes. Study pieces can be acquired for a bargain. Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery anca.net.au 1 Rosevear Place, (corner…

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental ace.gallery Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, SA 5000 [Map 18] 08 8211 7505 Tue to Sat 11am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 10 June—12 August ROCKAMORA Kaspar Schmidt Mumm Art Gallery of South Australia agsa.sa.gov.au Kaurna Country North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5000 08 8207 7000 Daily 10am–5pm. Free entry. See our website for latest information. 3 March–14 May Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media Exclusive to the Art Gallery of South Australia, this exhibition reveals an unseen side of celebrated Pop artist Andy Warhol through his career-long obsession with photography. Whether he was behind or in front of the camera, photography formed an essential part of his artistic practice while also capturing an insider’s view of his celebrity social world.…

Araluen Arts Centre, Mparntwe araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au 61 Larapinta Drive, Alice Springs, NT 0870 08 8951 1122 Daily 10am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 11 March—14 May Rauschenberg & Johns: significant others Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns In the early 1950s, at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, a new avant-garde began to emerge from a relationship between two young artists. From their run-down New York studios, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns began a private creative dialogue that introduced everyday signs, objects, and media into their work, collapsing the distinction between art and life. This exhibition will draw upon the National Gallery of Australia’s Kenneth Tyler Collection of prints with works by both artists produced between 1967 and 1973, and holdings of key works by their predecessors and contemporaries. 25…

Melbourne Goddess ACMI Until 1 October If the best lead actress nominations from this year’s Academy Awards are anything to go by, audiences want to see strong women on screen. That is exactly what ACMI’s new exhibition Goddess is delivering, celebrating the defiant disruptors and headstrong heroines of film through costumes, original sketches, interactive experiences and cinematic treasures. The women of Goddess are the ones who unapologetically occupy space both on and off the screen, challenging gender roles and social conventions. Some of them are household names—Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Pam Grier, and recent Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh—while other women’s stories and careers are little known. Like Fearless Nadia, the Australian actress who became Bollywood’s leading stuntwoman in the 1930s, and Cheryl Dunye, director and star of the 1997 landmark…

Dark Garden Valerie Sparks Bett Gallery Until 7 May Capturing the intricate details of nature, Hobart-based photographic artist Valerie Sparks creates visually immersive installations inspired by 19th century French scenic wallpaper and the work of female botanical artists. Deeply influenced by historic Australian women artists like Ellis Rowan, Marianne North, Louisa Anne Meredith and Margaret Anderson Hope, Sparks speaks of her enduring admiration for their output. “These women made significant contributions to our understanding of biodiversity. The remarkable detail in their images reveals not only their skills, but also their capacity for observation. Photography allows us to explore this level of detail as well, and to appreciate the importance of observation in our understanding of the natural world.” Working with photography and digital imagery, Sparks pieces her visuals together in…

Indigenous Woman Magazine Martine Gutierrez Cairns Art Gallery Until 18 June Martine Gutierrez is imagining a different reality for the fashion world. The Brooklyn-based artist was the editor, model, stylist and photographer on a 2018 project, Indigenous Woman Magazine, which became a fully realised, 124-page satirical publication, shining a light on beauty standards and stereotypes—and exploring what would happen if they were flipped. Cairns Art Gallery is exhibiting aspects of the project, split into three sections: Neo Indio (self-portraiture referencing Gutierrez’s Mayan Indian heritage), Queer Rage (exploring her transgender identity) and Masking (focusing on the face as a marker of self, and how it can be hidden or revealed). “The Masking series is related to an exhibition we had last year called Faceless, where we were looking at how Indigenous…

2023 Porter Street Commission: Kaspar Schmidt Mumm Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) 10 June—12 August Kaspar Schmidt Mumm is in the business of reconstruction. He uses local waste and rented equipment—scaffolding, recycled materials, laser cutting and programming—to create installations that can be made from scratch at each new location. With a practice also spanning painting, costume and performance, he’s invested in using art to heal communities. “I am deeply interested in the processes of colonial restitution,” he explains from Berlin. “I want to understand my own cultural history, but also that of the countries I have lived in. I see a huge gap in the understanding of cultural representation, and I believe I can make changes through contemporary art. I don’t believe that these processes are acts of revolution or revolt,…

A Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist of south-east Australia, Jonathan Jones has created works, from prints to light pieces to vast installations, centred on his relationship to Country and community. His latest work, untitled (walam-wunga.galang), showing at the National Gallery of Australia, is a monument to the cultural practice of breadmaking. In the early 1990s, a 32,000-year-old grindstone unearthed in New South Wales was revealed as being used for grinding seeds collected to make flour and bread. As writer and farmer Uncle Bruce Pascoe describes, the First Peoples of this region are some of the world’s oldest breadmakers which shifts settler narratives of Western nation building and speaks to the endurance of First Nation knowledge systems. Jones’s work at NGA features a series of sandstone grindstones, accompanied by a soundscape in…

First art love? Both Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frida Kahlo. Painting was my first medium, and as a young artist I was drawn to these artists who inscribed their work with both a deeply personal vision and a critique of societal issues. How and when did you first start knitting? I began knitting in 2000 after the tragic loss of my brother. In a moment of grief, my mother sat beside me and taught me to knit. In that moment, I understood knitting to be a powerful personal tool for narrating stories and creating new bonds. Do you have a favourite word or phrase that has appeared in your work? My favourite phrases include Anonymous was a woman, Keep your laws off my body, Feel Your Feelings and We’ll Be Less…

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 4a.com.au 181–187 Hay Street, Haymarket, Warrane/Sydney, NSW 2000 [Map 12] 02 9212 0380 29 April–11 June Louise Zhang: No dust left in the lilies 16albermarle 16albermarle.com 16 Albermarle Street, Newtown, NSW 2042 [Map 7] 02 9550 1517 or 0433 020 237 Thu to Sat 11am–5pm, or by appointment. 15 April–20 May Ghosts from the Past: Ipeh Nur and Enka Komariah Ghosts from the Past is a collaborative exhibition by Ipeh Nur and Enka Komariah. The Yogyakarta artist couple exhibit artworks rooted in research-based projects concerned with historical narratives and memories. Rumah Yang Yahud (A Cool House), an installation comprising 19 drawings, paintings and building scaffolding measuring approximately 300 x 400 x 400 cm, reflects the artists’ process of rethinking and rebuilding Indonesia’s national identity…

Bett Gallery bettgallery.com.au Level 1, 65 Murray Street, Hobart, TAS 7000 03 6231 6511 Mon to Fri 10am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–4pm. 12 May—3 June Thepa Mapa Hermannsberg Potters 12 May—3 June Don’t let leaves into your house Joan Ross Contemporary Art Tasmania contemporaryarttasmania.org 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 0445 Wed to Sun, noon–5pm. 29 April–27 May This too shall pass Ashe Colville Gallery colvillegallery.com.au 15 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, TAS 7004 [Map 17] 03 6224 4088 Daily 10am–5pm. 9 May–26 May Colours of Nature Sally James 30 May–17 June Sheep Country Lisa Moroney 20 June–8 July Coastal Landscapes and Flowers Jonathan Barnard Devonport Regional Gallery paranapleartscentre.com.au paranaple arts centre, 145 Rooke Street, Devonport, TAS 7310 03 6420 2900 Mon to Fri 9am–5pm, Sat and pub…

Art Collective WA artcollectivewa.com.au 2/565 Hay Street, Cathedral Square, Perth, WA 6000 [Map 19] 08 9325 7237 Wed to Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 12pm–4pm, or by appointment. 15 April–13 May Recent Paintings Kevin Robertson Kevin Robertson presents new work in a solo exhibition. The painterly surfaces of these new paintings record moments of both the observable world and the intuitive world that we inhabit simultaneously. The drifting subject matter - architectural spaces, figures and atmospheric studies - is connected by threads of heightened visual awareness. Planet of the Humans Antony Muia Antony Muia’s urban landscapes ponder humanity and the predicament of inhabiting planet Earth. This new series of prints are inspired by the beautiful and quirky nature of life. Muia’s graphic and linear style is simple, playful, and distinctive. The work…

MAP 1 VICTORIA 1 Ararat Gallery TAMA 2 Art Gallery of Ballarat 3 Arts Space Wodonga 4 The Art Vault 5 Benalla Art Gallery 6 Bendigo Art Gallery 7 Black Gallery 8 Boom Gallery 9 Castlemaine Art Gallery 10 Central Goldfields Art Gallery 11 The Distorted Frame 12 East Gippsland Art Gallery 13 Everywhen Artspace 14 The Foundry Arts Space 15 Geelong Art Space 16 Geelong Gallery 17 Gippsland Art Gallery 18 Hamilton Art Gallery 19 Horsham Regional Gallery 20 Latrobe Regional Gallery 21 La Trobe Art Institute 22 Maffra Exhibition Space 23 Mildura Arts Centre 24 National Wool Museum 25 Platform Arts 26 QDOS Art Gallery 27 Queenscliff Gallery 28 Post Office Gallery Art Academy 29 Red Tree Gallery 30 Rutherglen Art Gallery 31 Salt Contemporary Art 32 Shepparton Art…