Ian Potter Museum of Art, 5 September 2017 – 25 February 2018
By Julia Lomas
In Angela Brennan’s exhibition at the Potter, a wall painting of textual fragments poses the question: “What do you want a poet for? To save the city of course!” Brennan’s engagement with the artefacts of early Greek and Cypriot civilization has been framed as an investigation into how such signs, symbols and forms persist through the ages, contributing, as director Kelly Gelatly’s c...
Shepparton Art Museum, 11 November 2017 – 14 January 2018. Curated by Anna Briers.
By Kate Warren
There is nothing I enjoy more than a good impersonation. I recently came across a video of a young Martin Short appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The conversation had turned to the various impressions that Short was working on, when off-camera a voice is heard to ask, “Do you do me?” It’s actress Bette Davis, who had been Carson’s guest...
Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria Australia, 17 November 2017 – 12 March 2018
By Paris Lettau
Curated by National Gallery of Victoria contemporary art curator Pip Wallis, Our Knowing and Not Knowing: Helen Maudsley is one of four summer solo shows on the third floor of the NGV Australia, including Louise Paramour, Mel O'Callaghan and Del Kathryn Barton
Born in 1927, and coming of age when Australian painters were increasingly en...
Tolarno Galleries, Level 4/104 Exhibition St, Melbourne, 16 November 2017 - 16 December 2017
By Francis Plagne
As I was about to leave Tolarno Galleries after spending some time with Douglas Lance Gibson’s What Was Once Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, his first show with the gallery, I was stopped by two men. One, who I assume was some sort of building manager, informed me that a theft in the gallery had just been reported and...
Heide Museum of Modern Art, 4 November 2017 – 3 March 2018
By Chelsea Hopper
When you first start making stuff, finding your voice as an artist can be a bit of a slog. There will always be bad paintings, clumsy drawings of still lifes and failed charcoal figures from the life drawing classes you were forced to take at art school. It can be a case of trying things out and then trying them again and again. After a few years, you ultimately make the decisio...
Eastgate Gallery, 158 Burwood Road, Hawthorn, 14 October – 11 November 2017
By Ian McLean
An exhibition that caught my eye last week reminded me that the surrealists didn't seek their aesthetic thrills in Paris' modish contemporary art galleries or amongst the Old Masters in the Louvre, but in unexpected places. Somewhat off the beaten track, in an old picture framer founded in 1879, about a dozen very uncontemporary large abstract expressionist paintings occupied...
Westspace, 27 October – 9 December 2017
By Anna Parlane
Jason Phu’s My Parents Met at the Fish Market is the latest in Westspace’s series of solo commissions, in which all four galleries are given over to one artist. While he is younger and less experienced than previously commissioned artists, Phu is clearly up to the task of filling the space. His irrepressible style is immediately manifested in the fact that to enter the exhibition’s secon...
Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 15 September 2017 – 28 January 2018
By Rex Butler
The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Sebastian Smee barely got a word in during the Q & A held soon after the opening of Gareth Sansom’s retrospective at the NGV. Sansom, just about the ultimate alpha-male for all of his cross-dressing, entertained the audience with tales of his early cricketing prowess, his father returning home after the war without a limb, his e...
Melbourne's only weekly art criticism.
Published each Saturday
Reviews will be published weekly each Saturday
© 2019 Memo Review. Design: Memo Review. All rights reserved. Content appearing on this website remains the property of Memo Review. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
