Innehållsförteckning för Issue 58 från Artist Profile

Art activism and cultural boycotts have been with us for many years. In1968, the 34th Venice Biennale was marred in controversy. Police guarded the entrance as student protestors rushed to occupy several pavilions turning artworks to face the walls and replacing them with anti-war banners. The protests were eventually supported by artists who refused to show their work in solidarity with the students. Fifty-three years later it seems almost rhetorical to ask if art activism actually works. The outcome of the Venice protests, according to the New York Times, was for the organisers to adopt a more provocative curatorial agenda, establishing the series of exhibitions – which had been founded in 1895 – as forums for cultural debate. For example, the 1974 Venice Biennale was called Freedom for Chile, in…

Zofrea understood quite early in his development that music could nourish his creativity. He is as inspired by composers and performers as he is by painters from the early Renaissance to the modern. The language of symphonies and operas — not notes on a page, but the intensity of the engagement of multiple sounds and gestures conveying at once particular and ambiguous meanings and emotions — moulded his painting’s language. The more he listens and watches, the more his own creativity evolves. Zofrea’s paintings, drawings and prints have matured from his “Psalms” paintings into the “nature and light” works which have dominated his last eight years. During these years, he reached a turning point in his compositional methods. He is enticing us to experience the merging of music and poetry…

Everyone remembers epiphanies. They’re epiphanies! Whether they hit you in the mind, or in the body (or spirit), they are undeniable moments, sustained or fleeting, of deep connection to everything at once: every cog clicks, every synapse sparks. Revelatory. On my first day of art school the tutor gave everyone a sheet of paper and said, “You have thirty seconds to do something with that sheet of paper. No questions. GO.” Sheepishly, I held the paper in my hand and, like an animal in a herd, scrunched that piece of paper up into a ball: ninety per cent of the class did the same. The tired tutor said, “Great. you’ll be drawing, painting, sculpting that for the whole semester.” Shock, horror: my first impression of myself as a free-thinking art…

Dr. B. Marika was a very great Australian, a premier artist and fierce negotiator. She came from Yirrkala, North East Arnhem Land, the home of the Yolngu peoples. She pioneered Yolngu women’s art in many fields and by the time of her death in July 2021 had left a legacy that expressed her passionate commitment to Yolngu culture, her family, the environment, and sacred places of creation. Through lyrical lines, colour, mapping in precise formation, and respectful precision she was able to detail the sacred knowledge and creative forces of nature, yet had also taken a key role on fifty boards or advisory groups of state and national art institutions (including the National Gallery of Australia, 2012–2015) as well as environmental management bodies. All this whilst rearing five children, then…

Kym Barrett lives on the land of the Gubbi Gubbi people, on an acreage in Chatsworth, a resi-dential settlement, two and half hours north of Brisbane. The settlement is generally non-descript and sits amongst a backdrop of rolling hills and a well grazed landscape. Entering Barrett’s studio at the back of her property, however, is like entering another world. The small but busy studio looks down upon a private patch of forested riparian landscape and I can’t help but muse, as Barrett discusses her artistic journey and the role art plays in the exploration of her inner self, that this little oasis visually represents the rich thoughts and understandings of a person who has worked as a schoolteacher, raised three children, not travelled widely, and does not obsessively aspire for…

Jenn Nkiru’s REBIRTH IS NECESSARY, 2017, was exhibited in the group show TRANSFORMER: A Rebirth of Wonder at London’s 180 The Strand from October to December 2019. In those last months before shows shut down globally – that time which now feels so sweet and viscous, in retrospect – Institute of Modern Art (IMA) Director Liz Nowell saw the Nigerian-British filmmaker’s work in the gallery space. The piece will be installed at the IMA from May as it was in London: “As an immersive two-channel installation, with blue carpeted walls, a scent diffused through the space and a vinyl text on to wall which reads ‘The Black ecstatic cannot be contained,’” Nowell tells me. This presentation of the work itself is a re-imagination – or, a rebirth – of Nkiru’s…

Steve Lopes is an artist who finds himself at once both everywhere, and nowhere. An inveterate traveller since his youth, his insatiable curiosity for new experiences drives his art and desire to tell stories, connecting the threads of history and place with the people who have shaped them. Lopes grew up in Sydney with parents who migrated from the Aeolian Islands, a small rocky archipelago north of Sicily, before he was born. Like many children of immigrants, he always felt his experience of the world was suspended between two places – Australia with its short white history and ancient Indigenous one, and the rich Western traditions of his family’s Italian ancestry and his training as a painter. As an adult he moves freely from city to country, in Australia and…

There is no artist that I admire more greatly than Jonathan Jones. The first work I ever saw of his was, barrangal dyara (skin and bones), 2016, at the Royal Botanic Gardens on Cadi land of the Eora Nation. The expansive public installation outlined the perimeter of where the Garden Palace used to stand before it, along with its expansive collection of stolen Aboriginal artefacts, burned to the ground in 1882. When I look back on the experience, I remember how the work was a reminder that to be in Australia is to be on Aboriginal land. And that to be on Aboriginal land is the greatest privilege I have ever and will ever receive. Growing up in the affluent suburbs of Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia), I was deliberately taught…

WIN an artwork by SALVATORE 48 ZOFREA Subscribe to Artist Profile before 26 May 2022 to go into the draw to WIN Study for the Day Cycle I valued at $1,750.00 Salvatore Zofrea, Study for the Day Cycle I, 2021, watercolour, paper, 26 × 22 cm Visit artistprofile.com.au Salvatore Zofrea (b. 1946, Italy) is a leading Australian artist, whose intuitive pursuits for meaning through painting, drawing and print have become well known for their distinctive epic themes, as in the Day Cycle series, and for their masterful compositional harmony. Since his first solo exhibition in 1967 at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, he has gone on to have over fifty solo and countless group exhibitions throughout Australia. He has won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Sulman Prize on three occasions, has…

I met with Pulie at a time of in-between: when our social lives were part-online and part-in-person, at the end of one year and the start of a new one. On Zoom, she shared the narrative of her artistic practice from its early conception up until now. The narrative she told was as much a part of the work as the pieces she made. The narrative was linear, which suited to not only the progression of her works, but the ethos of their production. This articulation of her practice is derived from her PhD, which she completed in 2015. “The PhD set me on an academic track with what I do, so I see theory as part of my work as practice.” Theory, that is, has become a framework in…

In a career spanning over six decades, Gareth Sansom has garnered a reputation for being something of an iconoclast. Despite the perception that has clung to him for much of his career, Sansom was never interested in being recognised as some sort of provocative “bad boy,” he simply doesn’t place that much importance on the judgements of others. Such a posture might have long exceeded its usefulness, or settled into a stale contrivance preserved by an artist past their prime, whereas Sansom’s formidable output continues apace with a robust and almost obdurate vigour. Indeed, at eighty-two, both the man and his works remain expressive of the same conviction and ferocious dedication as ever. Sansom’s desire to provoke a visceral response from the viewer is evident in both his bracing approach…

Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka, Japan in 1972. Her parents came from the rural prefecture Kochi. In the summer they would take Shiota and her two brothers to her grandmother’s grave, which she would tend by removing the embedded weeds whose entangled roots were enmeshed in the soil above the body. It was a memory that would haunt her along with that of a fire at her neighbour’s house, which left a charred piano among the debris. Her parents ran a factory producing fish crates. Shiota knew that wasn’t for her. She was always drawing or painting, and at twelve years of age decided she would be an artist. In 1991, Shiota saw an exhibition of the Polish sculptor and fibre artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s work at the Museum of…

Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on 12 June 2021 to incredible critical acclaim and fervent public interest. The escalating Delta crisis in Sydney led to the exhibition’s premature closure after just fourteen days, but during its brief but brilliant moment in the light, artists Katy B Plummer and Nicole Barakat presented a performance-based public program entitled LET THIS MOMENT WATER YOU, that drew on their shared interests in divinatory practises. Plummer described the work as being born out of a desire to introduce af Klint’s practice to a general audience, whilst creating a “really lush and nourishing experience for people where they might put their critical, rational selves on mute and allow themselves to soak in something mysterious and lovely.”…

The inimitable Helmut Newton was a consummately skilled photographer, but his images are compelling for more than their opulent carefully chosen models and locations. Sometimes lush, sometimes a window into extreme wealth, and sometimes vertigo inducing – it’s the instantly recognisable psychology of his ideas that sets him apart. If you want a biography of Helmut Newton, look at the Helmut Newton Foundation official website or Wikipedia. It’s all there and it’s fascinating, but given I’m probably talking to a marginally informed audience let me summarise: Newton is widely regarded as one of the greatest photographic artists and fashion photographers of the twentieth century. And that is why the Jewish Museum of Australia is staging a “must-see” exhibition for lovers of great photography, gentrified erotica, and perversity from the fertile…

First impressions can be deceiving. The impact of this tenth version of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (the APT) was less of a bang and more of what initially seemed like a whimper. Where were the big names? Where were the familiar biennale/triennale tropes? Where were the instagrammable icons? Yet during the weeks since its opening night, this exhibition has proved to have a staying-power that carries it beyond the schlock tactics of so many big survey shows. Over successive visits, the “whimper” emerged as more akin to a radical quietism; a series of softly-slowly engagements full of reflections appropriate to the trepidations of this time. When borders closed in March 2020, the prospect of an international survey exhibition for 2021/22 seemed probably difficult, more likely impossible. As…

While he may not be a household name, Craig Tuffin is a well-known identity in photography and teaching circles. Alongside two decades of practice as a commercial photographer, his work with nineteenth century photographic techniques and processes has led him to be a popular speaker on the topic. His photographs have been collected by numerous institutions including the Getty Research Institute, the National Gallery of Australia, Tweed Regional Gallery and the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland. Since 2011 Tuffin has won numerous photographic awards and been exhibited worldwide from New York to The Netherlands and China. He is a five-time finalist in the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture and in 2021 received a Highly Commended acknowledgement from judge Michael Cook. This is Tuffin’s first solo…

"Queer” is a complex and fluid term. Historically it meant “strange” or “peculiar,” but from the late nineteenth century it came to be used as a slur against people expressing same sex desires. The contemporary usage of queer as an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender began in the 1980s, when LGBT activists (as they were known at the time) began to self-identify as queer. This deliberately provocative reclamation of the word was seen as a radical alternative to the more limiting categories of identity that made up the LGBT acronym. From these activist roots queer theory entered the academy in the early 1990s, extending some of the philosophical approaches of gay and lesbian studies and women’s studies within a postmodern framework, before the term transitioned…

George Tillianakis is many things all at once: video artist, composer, musician, performer, curator, collaborator, educator, facilitator. Despite the collaborative energy vital to these pursuits, he is fiercely independent. A lone wolf with a singular vision, his vast output as an artist over the last two decades has a clear-eyed coherence, oscillating from a cocky fuck-you attitude – “because that’s how I was raised” – to shoegaze introspection and vulnerability. The title of one of his recent album, Heavy Petal, 2021, sums it up to a tee. A graduate of the long-defunct art school at Western Sydney University, the Blacktown born and bred artist found a platform for the angst of growing up Greek-and-gay in a mostly hostile “westie” suburban setting. When lecturer and mentor, the late Debra Porch, told…

Our practice plays with the changing nature of cultural capital by pitting the sacredness and precariousness of the “live” in performance against ways of commodifying it and creating surplus value through ongoing forms of paratextual presence, both online and through performative interventions into everyday life. Our performances emerge out of an engagement with the work of being itself, being as work. The core of our practice is live, movement-based performance with traces of dance, sports and comedy. Our live work grapples with the value of performance and the performing body through playing with notions of the “virtuosic,” foregrounding the labour of performing bodies, and emphasising the unique “transaction” involved in the proximity of and relationship between performing bodies and spectators. We come from a background of contemporary performance, and feel…

Painter and printmaker, Charles Reddington, died on April 13th, 2021, at the age of ninety-two in his adopted town of Vilcabamba in Ecuador. While his name may not be familiar to a lot of people today, the influence on Australian art of his highly charged semi-abstract paintings and prints during the 1960s was immense. In a 1992 interview for the Australian Financial Review he told me that Robert Klippel had surprised him by saying: “Do you realise how important you were?” When he arrived in Australia from the US, Reddington was seen as a first-hand example of the new American abstract expressionism, known in Australia at that time only through magazine reproductions. Also, his approach to teaching art came as a breath of fresh air. But he remained unaware of…

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, a project of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), is the nation’s longest-running curated survey of contemporary Australian art. The Biennial is part of the Adelaide Festival, and since its inception in 1990 has exhibited nearly 500 artists to over one million visitors. It is a major exhibition for AGSA, which describes each iteration as “responding to a different theme or premise, acting as the register of the new, the enduring and the urgent issues of our time.” The curatorial direction of each Biennial is guided either by a guest curator or AGSA staff. For the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Sydney-based curator Sebastian Goldspink has developed the overarching theme Free/State. Appointed to the role in 2019, Goldspink notes this was prior…

Encountering Toba Khedoori’s work can be a destabilising, albeit exhilarating, experience. Her monumentally sized works on paper show highly detailed renderings of everyday things: a window, a piece of rope, an architectural structure. Yet rather than inspiring a sense of familiarity, the solemn images become allegories, disorienting and uncanny. The meticulously sketched objects are depicted from ambiguous perspectives, without any surrounding details. Instead, they float in an outsized expanse of blank space, as though they were apparitions in the mind’s eye rendering anything around them awash in white light. Absent any contextualising details or interpretative framework, the omitted information looms larger than the objects depicted, reverberating like an echo in an empty room. Spread across five galleries, the careerspanning survey at the Fridericianum in Kassel follows Khedoori’s oeuvre from 1994,…

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Primavera exhibition showcases the works of young, emerging artists who live and work in Australia. In Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Aboriginal curator, Hannah Presley, introduced us to five artists whose unique practices brought new perspectives on the exhibition’s focus on the contemporary and the emerging. Living and working in Naarm (Melbourne), Presley has recently delivered a number of exciting and distinctive exhibitions. Most notably, her curatorial voice in Big weather, 2021-2022, at the National Gallery of Victoria provided an intrinsically Indigenous perspective on climate change. Presley explains in a soundbite on the exhibition webpage that while only two of the artists she selected to exhibit their work in this year’s Primavera were Aboriginal, the origins of each artist’s techniques, the histories held by…