In 2016, The Age ended its weekly art review column, which it had been publishing for well over a century. For the first time, the public space occupied by the local art review has effectively been vacated in Melbourne. The art review is an important forum where meaningful dialogue and exchange can take place between artists, gallerists, critics, collectors and the public. Without a regular review, the art world lacks a meeting place where common ground can be found, be it to settle scores or clear the way for new conversations.
The editors at Memo Review recognise the need for a new format to fill the space left behind by the old newspaper publishers. For this reason, Memo Review launches itself as an online publication dedicated to accessible reviews of a broad variety of exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne. Reviews will appear weekly and where possible while the exhibition being discussed is still on. Written largely by art history post-graduates of Melbourne and Monash Universities, Memo Review will offer a variety of new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars.
We invite you to read Memo Review and to tell others if you have enjoyed what you have encountered here.
Issue No. 1
Grab a copy of Memo’s first glossy annual magazine issue, featuring an extended artist focus on Archie Moore, the 2024 Venice Biennale Australian Representative, with essays by Rex Butler, Tara Heffernan, Tristen Harwood, and Hilary Thurlow.
Issue 1 features articles by Audrey Schmidt, Philip Brophy, Helen Hughes, The Manhattan Art Review’s Sean Tatol, Cameron Hurst, Chelsea Hopper, among your favourite regular Memo contributors. There are reviews and articles, including on Melbourne design art, French literature’s ageing enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq, Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), the celebrated Spike magazine cultural critic, Dean Kissick, the local cult-favourite Jas H. Duke, and much, much more.
Memo Magazine, 256 pages, 16 x 25 cm
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