Art Almanac • 4th December 2023

Primavera 2023: Young Australian Artists

“I wanted to ensure that the darkness was balanced with lightness too.” Curated by Talia Smith, Primavera 2023: Young Australian Artists explores themes of protest, perseverance, and reimagining through the works of six artists, all aged thirty-five years and under.

Art Almanac • 27th August 2023

nightshifts

“The seen and the unseen.” The “after hours” as a metaphor is explored in nightshifts at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, with the exhibition focusing on the wholistic concept of retreat – an invitation to temporary seclusion, rest, and quietness from others.

Art Almanac • 9th August 2023

Rae Begley: Strange Quiet

“Strange Quiet is a meditation on time, an intimate interaction with the ecosystem of the reef, its mystery, its beauty, and its quiet fragility.”

Art Almanac • 18th July 2023

In the studio: Thea Anamara Perkins

“. . . it’s the vulnerable parts of myself and others that I want to engage with.” Art Almanac sat down with recent La Prairie Art Award winner Thea Anamara Perkins who uses personal narratives in her highly detailed paintings that challenge misconceptions. The Sydney-based artist has just moved from her studio at Carriageworks Clothing Store into a home/portable studio in anticipation of a year of travelling, seeing art, and developing her technical skills.

Art Almanac • 20th June 2023

TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili

ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili is a Gagana Sāmoan proverb translating to “the canoe obeys the wind,” and is the curatorial theme of the current TarraWarra Biennial as it moves across the waters to reframe the relationships between Australia and archipelagos in south/southeast Asia and south/southwest Great Ocean.

Art Almanac • 26th April 2023

In the studio: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

Working from his studio in rural Western Australia, Perth-born artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah explores life through his ‘magic realism’ style. Animals, mythology, and family history translate into artworks set in otherworldly installations that immerse the viewer. Abdullah offers a refreshing and honest take on his life as an artist, plus raising his three children in the bush.

Art Almanac • 21st February 2023

Air

“. . . what it means to breathe . . .” Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) summer blockbuster exhibition, Air, brings together an expansive collection of works by over thirty international and Australian artists, each who resist, disturb, and challenge notions of ecological harmony.

Art Almanac • 14th December 2022

Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists

Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, looks to tomorrow in a sensitive reimagining of speculative futures. The exhibition is alive, with emotions, feeling, and in sculptural form – activating the senses through textile artworks, sculptures, sound, video, smell, poetry, and documented performance.

Art Almanac • 12th November 2022

In the studio: Amber Hearn

“I felt owned by the landscape and always at home . . .” The colour-filled paintings and sculptures by Sydney-based Amber Hearn are reflective of her Annandale studio, where the artist welcomes in a kaleidoscope of hues. The composition and vividness stem from Hearn’s transient upbringing, travelling around the world with her family, living in Papua New Guinea and regional New South Wales. As such, the works transport the viewer to another place and time, evocative of memory and emotion.

Art Almanac • 3rd August 2022

In the studio: Julia Gutman

Sydney-based artist Julia Gutman revels in contradiction for her larger-than-life textile artworks. They are soft works in materiality, yet as Gutman “stabs” the textiles with her large needle, she enjoys the metaphorical “harshness” that rejects traditional polite and feminine embroidery notions. In her exhibition Muses at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney (28 July – 13 August 2022), Gutman turns on the male gaze in art history, reclaiming female bodies as she casts her friends posing in the studio, utilising clothing worn and donated by friends and family.

Art Almanac • 28th June 2022

Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island

resented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island is the Sydney-based artist’s first large-scale survey at one of Australia’s state museums. Bringing together over eighty works, the exhibition is curated by Erin Vink, curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and Isobel Parker Philip, senior curator of contemporary Australian art.

Art Almanac • 8th February 2022

Destiny Disrupted

Melbourne/Naarm-based curator, writer and scholar Nur Shkembi was invited by Talia Smith, curator at Granville Centre Art Gallery in Sydney, to present an exhibition inviting consideration from an art audience and the broader community in Western Sydney. The result is Destiny Disrupted, featuring the works of Australian-based Muslim artists: Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar, Safdar Ahmed, Elyas Alavi, Khadim Ali, Khaled Sabsabi, Omar J Sakr, Shireen Taweel, and Hossein and Nassiem Valamanesh, and Phillip George.

Art Almanac • 12th October 2021

Tarnanthi 2021

This October, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Tarnanthi’ will launch its sixth iteration of the festival that celebrates contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from across the country.

Art Almanac • 4th August 2021

Dean Cross: Icarus, my Son

At Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Dean Cross’ exhibition, ‘Icarus, my Son’, invites consideration of the connection of metropolitan Australia to its regional towns and the people who grew up in them. As the gallery reveals, ‘Icarus, my Son’, is a place to ‘ruminate on ideas of home, ambition, cataclysm and loss.’

Art Almanac • 13th July 2021

Made / Worn: Australian Contemporary Jewellery

The Australian Design Centre touring exhibition ‘Made / Worn: Australian Contemporary Jewellery‘ sees 22 artists at nine venues across Australia who examine the role of jewellery, expanding on the notion of wearable art and the diversity it entails.

Art Almanac • 8th July 2021

Stanislava Pinchuk: The Wine Dark Sea

Stanislava Pinchuk's artwork, The Wine Dark Sea, comprises of twenty-four pieces of marble – some the size of plinths, others brick size – conceptualise two stories told in tandem. The works are modular and stackable, each engraved by grave makers telling the narratives of Homer’s Odyssey and the Nauru cables.

16th June 2021

Sally Rees: CRONE

In 2020, three landmark exhibitions were set to open recognising an artist working in Australia through ‘The Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship’. On 18 June 2021, the Mona iteration finally opens with Hobart-based artist Sally Rees’ ‘CRONE’. Taking shape as an installation of 17 screens, featuring hand-painted animations that communicate through ‘bird-like calls’, forming the ‘crone-dome’, the exhibition reflects on both Rees and Cavaliere’s exploration of the self and the other side of femininity that rejects conformist notions of womanhood.

Art Almanac • 5th May 2021

Hayley Millar Baker: There we were all in one place

‘There we were all in one place’ brings together five photography art series from 2016 to 2019 by Gunditjmara woman and cross-cultural heritage artist Hayley Millar Baker.

Art Almanac • 22nd December 2020

Laura Jones: The Garden

Opening one year on from the start of the tragic bushfires, Laura Jones’ exhibition ‘The Garden’ at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum explores the tension that was left behind in vivid, gestural paintings.

Art Almanac • 16th November 2020

Amanda Tye: A Coastline and Between

In dreamy whimsical tones, evocative of the landscape as seen through a slumber’s daze, 'A Coastline and Between' by Amanda Tye captures Sydney’s snaking water’s edge in acrylic and oil on canvas.