Innehållsförteckning för Issue 34 från Artist Profile

JOE FROST is a Sydney-based painter. He is a National Art School Teacher. ANNA JOHNSON is an arts writer who contributes a monthly art column for Australian House & Garden and writes for Artist Profile. MICHAEL YOUNG is a journalist and visual arts writer based in Australia who regularly travels to China. JEREMEY ECCLES is a writer and broadcaster about the arts. Over the spectrum of the arts, his speciality is Indigenous art and culture. LUCY STRANGER is a Central West, NSW based arts journalist and Artist Profile writer. OWEN CRAVEN is Curator at Urban Art Projects. He is a former Editor of Artist Profile and Art Almanac magazines. SARA SWEET is a Sydney-based arts writer and artist. She is an Art Almanac Editorial Assistant. TONY LOPES is a commercial…

Empathy is crucial, it is what connects you to everything else. I suppose lots of artists might be interested in empathy in the sense that there is not much around. WHAT HAS INFLUENCED your approach to art? It is hard to say, you are what you are and other things affirm what you are. Because I was interested in art history, most of the things that I liked were pre-Renaissance. If I liked anyone, any artists, from the 20th century it was usually because they were influenced by the same things that I liked. When I was young I liked Balthus, and of course Balthus was really influenced by Giotto. It takes a while to find your way through art history and find out what you feel connected to. Your…

CHINESE-AUSTRALIAN ARTIST AH XIAN is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, and our recent conversation at his home in Sydney’s northern suburbs began with a dramatic announcement by him that he is no longer making the porcelain busts and cloisonné figures that propelled him to overnight success when he won the National Gallery of Australia’s inaugural National Sculpture prize in 2001 with ‘Human human – lotus, cloisonné figure 1’ (2000/01). With its beguiling otherworldly aesthetic, the life-size cast female Chinese figure demonstrated a unique and highly individual artistic language. Now in the Queensland Art Gallery collection, it showed the artist totally at ease in the cross-cultural space between his classical Chinese heritage and the western figurative canon that he had explored since seeking political asylum in Australia in 1990 following…

HOW CONSTRUCTED ARE YOUR images – are they experimental, instinctual or narrative-based? The construction and deconstruction of cultural iconography lies at the heart of my work. I am constantly exploring how we experience and interpret Pop culture in our everyday lives. In the initial stages of my art-making, I use sourced imagery in quite an experimental way, chopping and changing its meaning by applying a variety of word assemblages to see how they resonate. The degree of chance exercised in this process allows me to explore the Pop landscape, while looking for narratives to express through my work. All of the images that I draw on within my paintings already come with their own constructions that help to reveal some aspect of the contemporary Pop world, from its glossy veneer…

GILBERT & GEORGE Hilarious, insightful and controversial, it is without a doubt Gilbert & George’s first Australian retrospective will leave their mark on Australian culture. The tongue in cheek note appearing on the website says it all really, “You may be offended by this exhibition. You also may not. If you’d like to avoid it, see staff upon arrival.” Until 28 March MONA, Tas www.mona.net.au SHIMMER Delicate in touch and in their soft colours, shells carry an enigmatic beauty that cannot be reproduced. Shimmer looks at the historical, cultural and political implications for shell art practice in contemporary art. Until 6 March Wollongong Regional Art Gallery, NSW www.wollongongartgallery.com LISA WRIGHT | THE EDGE OF REASON Drawing a line in the sand between the rational and irrational, Wright proceeds to step…

LET’S GO TO ADELAIDE FIRST. In our mind? Yes! In our minds we shall visualise. Lisa Slade is curating you with other Australian artists in the 2016 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art: Magic Object, involving all the visual art forms. You’re driving a resurgence in Australian ceramics with other ceramicists. What does it mean to you to be curated for the first time outside the form of ceramics? Firstly, I can’t believe I’m in the show. And the second part of that is I can’t believe I’m in a show with Gareth Sansom, who I think is one of the greatest artists Australia has ever produced. I think Lisa Slade has taken a risk with me, because I am, as she describes me, an “insideroutsider”, which is how I feel.…

YOU’VE BALANCED YOUR ART-MAKING with being a high school visual arts teacher your whole career. Is routine a big part of the practice? Yes. Often I won’t start painting until 8:30 or sometimes 9pm – often when you’re least wanting to go painting. So that thing of the discipline of just forcing yourself to go to the studio is important. But once you get down there and turn on the music or the radio and start painting, it’s all good. And there is the advantage of the holidays – usually a time in which I work intensely. Do you usually set a theme and paint towards an exhibition in that manner? I don’t sit down and go, “Alright, the next group of works will be such and such.” It’s just…

FAMILY MONEY INSULATED Sunday Baillieu and John Reed from the Great Depression, and allowed them to be patrons of artists and writers in the mid-20th century. Establishing the Heide Museum of Modern Art, and their donations to other public collections, made the couple nationally famous. Their engagement with creative people was intensely personal, and their story has glamour, romance, sex, betrayal, power, money, and food. Heide curators Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan have previously co-written books about the garden planted, and the food served, when the Reeds lived on the rural holding that became the museum, but Modern Love has nothing of the “lifestyle” genre about it. Hazel Rowley’s double biographies, of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, discreetly confronted the issues of sexual predilection…

I AM INTRIGUED with architecture, particularly mid-century modern design and the principles that dictate its aesthetics. Though I appreciate the functionality of architecture, it is the inherent values found within its abstraction that inspires my work. I am fascinated with being able to place my body within a piece of functional art and to be able to experience that art through so many ‘dimensions’. When I move around and within a space, I see how it can morph into its surrounds as the light changes, and it is this notion that I wish to capture. I attempt to deconstruct the fundamentals of architecture, stripping it of its functionality and order to be left with what it is that creates the aesthetically fascinating dimensions that I see and feel when inside…

THE FIRST PAINTING MY FATHER, Michael Johnson, looked at closely as a child was an intense nocturnal work by Albert Pinkham Ryder called ‘Toilers of the Sea’. In art historical terms, Ryder inspired the early Modernists but was attributed with a naive crudity. Some considered him a cult Romantic landscape painter. Yet through Johnson’s lifetime this small oil painting from the late 19th century moved with him, mapping an evolution of experience, from night fishing in Sirius Cove, to painting minimal shaped canvases in nocturnal hues, through a long passage of gestural work, right up to a painting finished in the first lunar month of this year, ‘Helix’ (2016). The force of Ryder’s painting, glowing with a heavy moon, advancing with great curves of paint and receding into the darkness…

MELBOURNE’S YOUNG ARTISTS of the 1940s, the avant-garde then derided as Modernists and later known as the Angry Penguins, gave Australian art one of its most important moments of social and aesthetic transgression. The time Ken Whisson spent with the group while still in his teens was an education in art like no other, visiting Albert Tucker’s studio, painting with Danila Vassilieff as a teacher, and discovering Sidney Nolan’s electrifying new Australian landscapes, prior to the Kelly series. It’s almost apt to say that Whisson was born into the family of this milieu, as his cousin Pauline, with her husband Jack McCarthy, owned one of the artists’ haunts, a lending library which Whisson fondly describes as “a detective, mystery and romance library, with rooms behind with lots of prints on…

A ROCKY OUTCROP OVERHANGING the perilous climb to their trenches came to symbolise the tribulations of the Anzacs at Gallipoli: its shape is reminiscent of the Sphinx in Egypt, and they named it after that enigmatic sculpture. Euan Macleod’s ‘Sphinx’, part of an upcoming new solo exhibition of 27 paintings, Boneyard, for Niagara Galleries, Melbourne in April, is one of the most profoundly complex and confronting works for our time. Brushed in oils, the dynamic and imposing painting depicts a group of Turkish women and two men wandering past the outcrop. The women are mostly wearing black hijabs while the leading men are wearing white long-sleeved shirts and trousers. They walk in a linear formation; the railings pose a barrier to an approach and a fall, perhaps to the return…