Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, 19 May – 10 June 2017
By David Wlazlo
This week marks fifty years since the 1967 referendum and last week at Uluru a meeting of Indigenous leaders met to discuss a united strategy on constitutional recognition. Fifty years is a long time in anyone’s book, and with little material progress toward reconciliation, recognition, and ‘bridging the gap’, there is a widespread consensus that a symbolic mention is not enough to decolonise Australia’s foundin...
Blak Dot Gallery, 33 Saxon St Brunswick, 11 – 28 May 2017
By Anna Parlane
It's not often acknowledged just how much visual art comes to life through words, conversation, storytelling. Or, at least, it's not often explicitly acknowledged. It's implicitly acknowledged constantly: every time an art gallery stages an artist talk or public program, for example, or in the screeds of text published by art historians, critics and commentators. Artworks are...
Deakin University Art Gallery, Burwood, 26 April – 26 May 2017
By Amelia Winata
I am hesitant to say that I am employed. Although to say I am unemployed is also incorrect. I do not have a job to go to, but I do have four email addresses — 1 personal, 3 professional — and from the moment I wake to the moment I go to sleep my mind is preoccupied with work. The question is, at what level of productivity am I working? I check emails when I get u...
National Gallery of Victoria, St Kilda Road, Melbourne, 28 April – 9 July 2017
By Anthony White
There are many extraordinary works of art to be seen in Van Gogh and the Seasons and yet certain aspects of the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition are disappointing. Individual paintings that stand out as masterpieces of modern art are shown side by side with frankly insignificant and minor pieces. In addition,...
The Art Gallery of Ballarat, 40 Lydiard St Nth, Ballarat, 1 April – 28 May 2017
By Victoria Perin
The Harold Freedman exhibition, on display at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until the end of this month, is sub-headed ‘Artist for the people’. In order to entice people deep into the pokey rear galleries where the show is hung, it would seem that a degree of assuagement is required. Trust me people, promises the curator, this is an artist for you!
C...
Sutton Gallery, 21 April – 20 May 2017
By Paris Lettau
There is an irony to Hebdomeros, and that is that the exhibition teaches us more about the Italian 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) than it does about either of its two collaborating Melbourne based artists, Raafat Ishak and Damiano Bertoli.
The modest exhibition, which accompanies Ishak's solo exhibition 1977 (in Sutton Gallery's adjacent room), takes its title fro...
National Gallery of Victoria, St Kilda Road, 10 March – 27 August 2017
By Beth Kearney
Even now, it is difficult to visit a Bill Henson exhibition without being burdened by the controversy that occurred at Roslyn Oxley9 just less than nine years ago. Stylistically, however, Henson has not changed his tack: the exhibition Bill Henson, part of the NGV’s Festival of Photography, is yet another rearticulation of his most recognisable qualities as an artist.
...
Vivien Anderson Gallery, 29 March – 29 April 2017
By Helen Hughes
In recent years, Bruce Pascoe's widely read Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (2014) and Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011) have helped cultivate a more general understanding of the history of Aboriginal land management, agricultural practices, and general custodianship of the lands and waterways of this continent. Their scholarship h...
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