A ‘behind the scenes’ account of the planning of the $100,000 Basil Sellers art Prize. Building a better art prize Tonight (25 July 2014) the winner of the fourth A$100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize will be announced at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, chosen from shortlist of 16 artists and decided by a panel of six […]
Tag Archives | Australian art
Dale Hickey, ‘New Paintings’, 2005
This piece was written for the exhibition brochure. As always, Hickey’s work prompted me to reflect on how complicated supposedly simple paintings can be. When paintings have a singular target, the writer’s task seems straightforward enough. Because Dale Hickey’s new paintings circle around the motif of the artist’s studio, they teasingly invite the writer to […]
Barry Pearce, ‘Brett Whiteley: art & life’, 1995
Reviewing Barry Pearce’s catalogue/biography for the 1995 Brett Whiteley retrospective alerted me to two themes that I’ve circled around on-and-off ever since. First, that a good deal was being missed in looking art Australian. Visiting the exhibition itself, I realized that many elements visible in the art works—texts, collage elements, marginal images—were being over-looked. And […]
Stephen Bush, ‘Steenhuffel’, Ian Potter Museum of Art, 26 March–6 July 2014
In the evening, after I had last visited Stephen Bush’s exhibition ‘Steenhuffel’, I set about reading M P Shiel’s 1901 novel The purple cloud. I mean it to sound like a job of work; the book is the sustained ranting of the last man living, a descent into madness larded with arcane language and page-long […]
Doug Hall, ‘Wreckage and reclamation: politics and art in Brisbane 1987-1997’, 3 June 2014
After heading up the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) for twenty years, Doug Hall has more, and juicier, war stories than any other museum director in the country. Arriving in Brisbane in the twilight years of the Bjelke-Petersen National Party government, Hall described his political masters as pastoralists (read, ‘rednecks’) soon to take starring roles in a succession of […]
Jenny Watson, ‘A painted page’ series (1978–79), 2014
In ‘Trying to live now: chronotopic figures in Jenny Watson’s ‘A painted page’ series’, I bring together, for the first time, the six paintings in this important sequence from 1979–80. Combining gridded, painted reproductions of photographs, newspapers and department store catalogues with roughly painted fields of colour, the series combined a range of recent styles and […]
Linda Marrinon: let her try 2007
In Linda Marrinon: let her try, Chris McAuliffe explores the motivations and development of one of Australia’s most innovative and idiosyncratic artists. Since she first exhibited in 1983 Linda Marrinon has defied both expectations and definitions. She was at first embraced by the art world elite; critics, curators and collectors flocked to her shows. But […]
Jon Cattapan: possible histories, 2008
This book traces the art of Jon Cattapan from Dadaist grotesquerie and surrealist erotica of his student days to current explorations of global information flows and urbanism. Written in close collaboration with the artist, the book contains extensive artist interviews and statements drawn from the 1970s through to the present, as well as numerous illustrations […]
The artist as rock music fan, 1998
This piece is an example of my habit of filing thoughts away until things start to click. I saw the ‘Fandom’ exhibition in New York in November 1997 and Mutlu Çerkez’s exhibition back in Melbourne. In mid-1998 I was back in New York, where I saw Elizabeth Peyton’s work at MoMA and Erik Hanson’s drawings […]
The Shilo project, 2009–10
‘The Shilo project’ was an art exhibition born in an opportunity shop on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. There I found two copies of Neil Diamond’s 1970 album Shilo. On one sleeve, the connect-the-dots portrait of Neil Diamond on the cover had been completed; the other was unblemished. Driving home, it occurred to me that it would […]