Tag: Contemporary Painting

Pieces of Spaces and Other Places

Carla Cescon and

Tina Havelock Stevens

By Jane O'Sullivan — 9 October, 2020

Flux and change prevail in Pieces of Spaces and Other Places, a collaborative exhibition project by Carla Cescon and Tina Havelock Stevens. The idea of fatalism is handled in different ways: Cescon through tarot and symbolism, and Havelock Stevens through forces of nature. The work of both artists is deeply personal, and about ageing parents….

Complaint as Counteraction:

Disputing the Archibald Prize

‘You are heard as making a complaint; you are heard as being complaining. You are heard as expressing annoyance about something. Grumbling; grumble; grump; grumpy. You might be offering a careful critique. You might be taking care. It doesn’t matter how much care you take; how much time you take in assembling a case. It…

The Eternal Opening

Mike Parr

By Fiona McGregor — 20 November, 2019

‘I am fascinated by dualisms, mirror images, blindness and invisibility, subject/object reversals, the roles of artist and audience and all my work, since my earliest performances of the 1970s exacerbates such tensions, as the deeper structure of both thought and image.’ Mike Parr, (January 1998)   Entering the space, you see a large rectangular installation…

The Promised Land

Michael Armitage

By Lucie Reeves-Smith — 13 August, 2019

A fortnight of equatorial downpours preceded the opening of Michael Armitage’s solo exhibition, The Promised Land, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. With a heavy blanket of humidity cast across the city, this oppressive atmosphere seemed to sit comfortably alongside the bright colours and rotting surfaces of his paintings. Slick and warm, the…

Falling from a Broken Ladder

Chris Dolman

By Chelsea Lehmann — 12 April, 2019

‘Judge me, please don’t judge me’ is the subtitle of Manuela Ammer’s catalogue essay on the topic of eccentric figuration, which accompanied the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the information age (2015/16) at the Brandhorst Museum. In this essay, Ammer frames a discussion of Nicole Eisenmann’s work around the concept of the painted body as…

The Canonisation of Quilty

By Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung — 5 March, 2019

Classical depictions of Christ have historically been used to inspire awe and wonder for the purpose of social control. We need only think of Rubens and Raphael for Him to emerge in our collective imagination: Jesus reaching out from the canvas and into our reality with divine luminescence. These are images borne of a master’s…

An Image of a Tiger

Jess Bradford

By Naomi Riddle — 2 November, 2018

The website for the Singaporean cultural park Haw Par Villa (formerly known as the Tiger Balm Garden) proclaims that the park is a ‘treasure trove of Asian culture, history, philosophy and religion—quirky yet enlightening, at the same time.’ Built in 1937 by Aw Boon Haw, a millionaire philanthropist who marketed Tiger Balm ointment to the…