Tag: American art
Zoe Leonard: Al río/To the River
Tuesday, September 26th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Zoe Leonard’s Al río/To the River is an exhibition that will test local audiences. It’s a deeply serious, critically acclaimed project featuring many hundreds of black-and-white images, that took five years to complete. The show is accompanied by a two-volume Hatje Cantz publication, with parallel texts in English, Spanish and French, in which the artist […]
Philip Guston Now
Tuesday, May 30th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,We are forever hearing about artists whose work is “challenging” and “subversive”, usually in the context of some prestigious museum survey. In the pageant of contemporary art, the oppositional artist has become a stock figure. He, she, or they know exactly what buttons to push to win the esteem of institutions that passionately need to […]
Doug Aitken: New Era
Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Doug Aitken, born and based in California, is one of the most globalised of all contemporary artists. He once told an intervewer that “home can be motion” and his work sets out to prove that proposition. His projects are often conceived on a grand scale, requiring teams of collaborators. He makes video, photography, sculpture, performance, […]
Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story
Wednesday, August 28th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It’s a sign of the times when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, one of the standard bearers for modern art, hosts an exhibition exposing the brutality of the city’s police force. In the age of Trump the United States has become a radically divided nation where issues such as refugees, racism and […]
Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor
Thursday, May 30th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“Playful” is the word on everyone’s lips as they go around the National Gallery of Victoria’s Alexander Calder survey. Yet for Sandy Rower, the artist’s grandson, who manages the Calder Foundation in New York, the term is completely taboo. Rower argues that to imagine Calder (1898-1976) was “playful” is to completely misjudge his character. Based […]
O'Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism
Friday, July 7th, 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Column,There are exhibitions that sound marvellous in theory but somehow fail to measure up when they make it to the gallery walls. O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism at the Art Gallery of NSW is an almost perfect example. As one of those projects that puts Australian artists on equal terms with a better known […]
William Eggleston: Portraits
Thursday, June 1st, 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In By the Ways, an off-beat documentary about William Eggleston, there is a sequence in which the photographer answers questions from an unseen German interviewer. Straining after profundity the interviewer asks: “Do you understand your work as an expression of your existence?” There’s an agonising pause, then a response in Eggleston’s southern drawl: “Probably.” Eggleston […]
Salon des Refusés 2015 & Stars + Stripes
Saturday, August 8th, 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Archibald season demands to be taken seriously because it’s the only time of the year most of the public feel motivated to visit the Art Gallery of NSW and associated venues. During the Archibald Prize the AGNSW is full of people – a surge in visitation that has become more crucial than ever. With both […]
America: Painting a Nation
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“Thus in the beginning,” wrote the philosopher, John Locke in 1689, “all the world was America.” He was referring to a primitive state of social organisation being rapidly improved by British colonialism. Nowadays Locke’s words seem just as true, but it is because America has colonised the rest of the world. For much of the […]
Masami Teraoka, Migration
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012 Art Essays, International Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,One of the strangest developments in the Sydney art scene is the sudden upsurge of galleries showing and selling high priced international art. This is surprising, given the fact that these are dismal times for retail and the art business is essentially retail with delusions of grandeur. There are only two explanations: either there are […]