Gian Manik in the Bayside Painting Prize

Congratulations to Gian Manik, whose painting Self belief, insanity, literature and human culture (2023) has been selected for the Bayside Painting Prize 2024.

A celebration of contemporary Australian painting, the Bayside Painting Prize brings together a broad range of artists whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting today. The finalist exhibition at the Bayside Gallery in Brighton, VIC, will showcase the selected painting from each shortlisted artist.

Bayside Painting Prize 2024
Bayside Gallery, Brighton, VIC
3 May – 23 June 2024

Arlo Mountford at Assembly Point

Arlo Mountford’s installation Revolutions is currently on show at the vitrine space Assembly Point in Southbank, Naarm/Melbourne, in the centre of the city’s Arts Precinct.

Situated firmly within a busy public thoroughfare, this installation comprises a series of mechanical thaumatropes mounted onto wooden trestles. A nineteenth century toy, the thaumatrope presents a paper disk that spins rapidly, creating an optical illusion through which a total image emerges. In Mountford’s work Revolutions, the phrases “It’s time.” and “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” arise through this accelerated motion, instating a familiar, verbalised text in this unfamiliarised public setting. In this regard, the phrases emerge through an absence of authorship; blurred directives in a busy section of the city which emanate out of a dark vitrine, the works circumvent further context, instead presenting as sinister affirmations that question the present, future and past.

Arlo Mountford
Revolutions
Assembly Point, Southbank, VIC
28 February – 31 March 2024

Ann Debono at Metro Arts

Metro Arts in Brisbane will present a solo exhibition of new works by Ann Debono that respond to the construction site of the Westgate Bypass Flyover, entitled Bypass Blue Abyss.

Composing the paintings from photographs taken of the site over the course of two years, this exhibition considers how Modernist values of velocity, progress, efficiency, and growth are materialised in the built environment.

On the theme behind the exhibition’s subject matter, Debono has explained her understanding of the Westgate Bridge construction project as “as a massive, spectacular sculpture: intensely synthetic and ahuman, animated by vehicles and machinery; trains, lorries, cars, loading cranes, construction machinery and container ships.”

Ann Debono
Bypass Blue Abyss
Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane
4 May – 1 June 2024

Rosslynd Piggott in ‘A Space Between’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art

Rosslynd Piggott painting Divided Bridge (1997) is featured in the group exhibition Heide Modern: A Space Between currently on show at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Heide Modern: A Space Between explores the concept of home as a site where conversations, recreation, labour, intimate relationships and closely held values and beliefs cohabitate. The exhibition centres around the profound consideration of how architecture fundamentally shapes lived experience. The original furniture from David McGlashan is displayed alongside a selection of artworks from the John and Sunday Reeds personal collection, together with the museum’s wider holdings which have continued to develop in the decades since Heide opened to the public in 1981. The show reflects on ideas of memory and domesticity, and the intersection of private and public life in the context of a former residence turned public art museum.

Heide Modern: A Space Between
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Naarm/Melbourne
20 February – 14 July 2024

Vivienne Binns in ‘Staging Oneself’ at Cairns Art Gallery

Vivienne Binns’ video work Self-portrait Self-image (1980) is featured in the group exhibition ‘Staging Oneself: Photography and New Media Self-Portraits by Women Artists’ currently on show at Cairns Art Gallery.

Staging Oneself examines the creative ways in which contemporary women artists use role play, disguise, and self-portraiture to explore womanhood and female identity within the public and private spheres. Using photography and new media, these self-portraits reveal a complex interpretation and understanding of identity informed by real and imagined experiences.

Vivienne Binns’ video work Self-portrait Self-image (1980) consists of an interview and a two-channel slideshow – one depicting the life of her mother Joyce, and the other revealing events from corresponding years in the artist’s life. The artist’s work seeks to give value to hitherto ignored, and subverted aspects of women’s lives, questioning notions of self-identity, along with the colliding public and private worlds inhabited.

Staging Oneself: Photography and New Media Self-Portraits by Women Artists
Cairns Art Gallery
24 February – 19 May 2024

Peter Robinson participating in the symposium ‘The in and the out of it’ at Artspace Aotearoa

On the occasion of the two-person exhibition Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson at Artspace Aotearoa, the institution will host a symposium entitled ‘The in and the out of it’ on Saturday 9th March.

The symposium aims to explore the zones of the artworld(s) by presenting a variety of positions from across the motu spanning artistic practice; collection politics; and the productions of art history. During the symposium, Peter Robinson will be in conversation with artist Ngahuia Harrison to discuss the exciting yet ambivalent process of moving work from a studio, community, or whānau context, into the public realm. They will address questions such as ‘What types of supportive protocols do artists establish to navigate this?’ and ‘What is the in and the out of the studio?’ throughout the talk, which will be followed by a Q&A.

This symposium is a Chartwell 50th Anniversary 2024 Project. Space is limited and booking is essential.

The in and the out of it (Symposium)
Artspace Aotearoa
Saturday, 9 March 2024
10:00 – 15:30 NZDT

Gordon Bennett, Karen Black and Kate Smith in Thresholds at Murray Art Museum Albury

Artworks by Gordon Bennett, Karen Black and Kate Smith are included in the group exhibition Thresholds currently on show at the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), NSW.

This exhibition showcases recent museum acquisitions, placing new works in dialogue with longstanding fixtures that represent the collection’s strengths. Thresholds considers to a process-led development of collecting and the variables of working with collections, contemplating where artworks can exist as portals to an ever-expanding world of unexpected sites and unanticipated tangents.

Thresholds
Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), NSW
23 February – 10 June 2024

Review: Helen Hughes, “John Meade at McClelland Art Gallery”, ArtForum

Read Helen Hughes’ insightful review of John Meades’s recent exhibition It’s Personal! at McClelland Gallery in ArtForum, March 2024.

“Meade has honed his craftsmanship across an impressive range of materials and methods (including resin, fiberglass, and enamel, as well as casting and TIG welding) so as to produce taut surfaces that rebuff, or perhaps even deny, interiority. Whether deployed as a veil or as armor, Meade’s exteriors disarm the relationship between a subject and its knowability.”

Nusra Latif Qureshi at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

We are thrilled to announce that Nusra Latif Qureshi will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) later this year. This marks the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work in an Australian institution, tracing Qureshi’s 30-year career.

Known for her intricately composed miniature paintings that draw simultaneously on historical and contemporary references, the artist’s experimentational practice parses out the ambivalence of tradition through a comprehensive methodology that extends to collage and photography.

The exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales will be accompanied by a comprehensive publication, featuring essays by local and international writers that explore the significance of the artist’s practice within contemporary Australian art.

Nusra Latif Qureshi
Art Gallery of New South Wales
9 November 2024 – 9 February 2025

Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™ at Benalla Art Gallery

Benalla Art Gallery will present Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™, a presentation of the artist’s recent video works, Radical Acts (2020) and the titular New Futures™ (2021).

Rendered from generic, commercial stock footage, Kosloff’s work elicits acerbic criticism from dystopian, unsettling stories that invoke the mundanity of corporate-led late-capitalist societies. Often entwining darkly humorous themes with uncanny yet fathomable storylines, Kosloff manipulates and edits stock footage to constantly shift narratives, presenting alternative and speculative futures unshackled from the authorial presence of the artist. These works in turn often attend to matters of moral corruption, political apathy, tensions between socio-cultural values and representation in the public realm.

Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™ is an official exhibition of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography, a major biennial of new photography and ideas taking place from 1–24 March in Melbourne and regional Victoria.

Laresa Kosloff: New Futures™
Benalla Art Gallery
23 February – 28 April 2024

Gordon Bennett: Thin Lines at Melbourne Art Fair

Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Gordon Bennett: Thin Lines, fourteen abstract line paintings on paper from the highly acclaimed contemporary artist Gordon Bennett.

The presentation comprises a series of paintings exhibited at Melbourne Art Fair for the first time in their history, twenty years on from their production in February 2004, and ten years on from the artist’s untimely passing.

Melbourne Art Fair
Booth C2
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
22–25 February

Catherine Bell in ‘One foot on the ground, one foot in the water’ at Caboolture Regional Art Gallery

Catherine Bell’s series of hand-carved sculptures from floral foam, Final resting place (2018–19), will be on show at the Caboolture Regional Art Gallery as a part of the touring group exhibition One foot on the ground, one foot in the water.

On tour from NETS Victoria, the exhibition centres the practices of artists who explicate materially the precarity of our contemporary condition. Yoking thematics of mortality through a material practice, harnessing the lingering uncertainty and infinite permutations of future, this show weaves an inseparable link between life and death through a considered collation of contemporary artists in Australia.

One foot on the ground, one foot in the water
Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Caboolture, QLD
9 March – 1 June 2024

Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson at Artspace Aotearoa

Artspace Aotearoa will present a two-person exhibition showcasing the work of seminal German artist Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) and leading Aotearoa artist Peter Robinson. Coupled together here to examine how each artist establishes grammars of expression by testing out systems of assembly, seriality, and repetition, Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson will showcase each artist’s proficiency to push at the intrinsic nature of space and its undeniably social potential.

Presented in dialogue here, the presentation at Artspace Aotearoa examines the process through which their respective work asks fundamental questions of us as an audience: what are the rules of engagement here? How do we relate to one another? Do we want to participate in this? What happens next? Expanding on this, both artists have necessarily wrestled with the legitimacy of art and the artworld as a territory where change can happen. Spanning sculpture, painting, film, and archival documentation, in this exhibition we encounter an arc of contemporary sculptural practice that calls up its very emergence as a Western construct in mid 20th-century Europe to our present-day Aotearoa.

In this artworld-in-the-world we are invited to consider our bodies in relation to edges, where one thing ends and another begins. This activates the spatio-political quality of time with both artists tapping into this ambiguity: time as a monetizable measure, as an expressive singularity, as a language. This exhibition dives into form: waka, or tongues, or chimneys, or motorways, as well as the labour that it takes to produce all of this—our world in which we live together.

Priorities: Charlotte Posenenske and Peter Robinson
Artspace Aotearoa
10 February – 6 April 2024

Nusra Latif Qureshi Artist Talk at MK Gallery

Nusra Latif Qureshi will take part in the Beyond the Page Conference at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes on the occasion of the artist’s inclusion in the landmark group exhibition currently on view at the museum, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now.

Artists, art historians and authors will gather for a day-long interdisciplinary discussion of the entangled histories of Britain and South Asia, their impact on the evolution of the miniature painting tradition and its revival as an aesthetic and critical force in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Nusra Latif Qureshi
Beyond the Page Conference
MK Gallery (Milton Keynes, UK)
19 January 2024
10:00 – 17:00 GMT

Please note this event is ticketed and has a limited capacity for in-person attendance. There will be an online version of the conference which will be live-streamed throughout the day (booking required).

Kate Beynon Painting Workshop at the National Portrait Gallery

Kate Beynon will lead a portrait painting workshop at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra/Ngambri on Saturday 20th January.

Inspired by her Archie100 work ‘Self-portrait with Guardian Spirits’ (2010), in addition to the artist’s additional Archibald Prize selected portraits, Kate Beynon will share her ‘Archie’ insights and guide participants through a painting workshop to depict one’s family (and furry friends). Through the use of watercolour, gouache and metallic pigments, attendees will create their own mini portraits by exploring supernatural elements such as guardian spirits, shapeshifting and talismans.

Kate Beynon
Workshop: Supernatural Fam Faces
National Portrait Gallery (Canberra/Ngambri)
20 January 2024
11:00 – 14:00 AEDT

Please note this event is ticketed and has a limited capacity.

Aleks Danko in ‘Old Dog New Tricks’ at Ngununggula

Aleks Danko’s sculpture ‘Log Dog’ (1970) is currently on show in the exhibition ‘Old Dog New Tricks’ at Ngununggula.

Presenting works by artists who use the canine to interrogate modes of communication, the exhibition re-examines and re-frames mythology, alternative biologies by showcasing a menagerie of creatures who resist classification. Here, dogs are our muses, collaborators, guides, protectors, comedians, companions and shrines. This exhibition celebrates the implosion of nature and culture through the intertwined lives of dogs and people.

Old Dog New Tricks
Ngununggula
18 November – 4 February 2024

Mia Boe in ‘From the other side’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

Mia Boe in included in the group exhibition ‘From the other side’ currently on show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).

Embedding the self within a distorted scenography of quintessential Australian cinema, the artist re-populates film stills from ‘Walkabout’ and ‘Wake in Fright’ (both 1971) through the figuration of a spectral presence painted atop the lightbox surface.

Boe has produced two new works, ‘A Desolate Primitive Place’ and ‘I Suspect’ (both 2023) that mark the artist’s first employment of the lightbox as an agent of display and support. The silhouetted figures laid upon this illuminated surface disquiet the sinister and tension-filled spaces in each frame, reasserting presence in instances of narrative cinema which proliferate a jarring and ambiguous relationship to space and place.

Curated by Jessica Clark and Elyse Goldfinch, the exhibition brings together nineteen Australian and international artists, integrating historical and contemporary works alongside key new commissions that draw upon horror’s capacity to transgress and destabilise forms of power and subjugation. The exhibition casts a lens upon feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.

From the other side
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
9 December 2023 – 3 March 2024

John Meade in conversation with curators Russell Storer and Zara Stanhope at McClelland

On the occasion of John Meade’s solo exhibition It’s Personal! at McClelland, the artist will be in discussion with curators Russell Storer (Head Curator of International Art, National Gallery of Australia) and Zara Stanhope (Ringatohu/Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu). A part of the McClelland Critical Perspective Series, the discussion will offer sensitive insights to further understand the drives and conceptual framework behind Meade’s practice from two of the leading museum curators in Australia and New Zealand.

John Meade in conversation with Russell Storer and Zara Stanhope
Through their eyes: McClelland Critical Perspective Series
Saturday 20 January 2024, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm.
McClelland Gallery, Melbourne

Sara Hughes ‘Glass Canopy’ re-installed at the New Zealand International Convention Centre

The largest ever public art installation in New Zealand has been reinstalled following damage to the facade of the building during the 2019 Auckland fires.

Sara Hughes designed a “glass forest” to enwrap the facade of the NZICC, Auckland for an installation that strives to reflect the unique New Zealand ecosystem, bringing the experience of the sublime natural environment to the urban landscape. The work clads the top level of the iconic building, consisting of 2,400 sq. meters of glass and comprising of over 550 panels in 60 different colour tones.

On the inspiration behind the installation, Hughes explained that the visual effect rendered by the work “reflects the experience of walking through the New Zealand bush and looking up through a canopy of trees to see the unique light and colour of the forest.”

Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone at the MCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) will open the largest museum survey of Nicholas Mangan’s practice to date next year.

Organised by MCA curators Anneke Jaspers and Anna Davis, Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone charts the evolution of Mangan’s distinctive visual language over two decades, culminating with his latest project Core-Coralations (2021–ongoing), inspired by the challenges facing the Great Barrier Reef.


Exhibition highlights will include Ancient Lights (2015), a film that considers our relationship to the sun powered by solar panels installed on the MCA building; Limits to Growth (2016–ongoing), which compares Bitcoin with an ancient form of stone currency from the Pacific; and Termite Economies (2018–2021), a series of sculptures that evoke non-human labour and social organisation.


The exhibition, designed by architect Ying-Lan Dann, will be accompanied by a monograph containing newly commissioned essays. In addition, a series of public programs will take inspiration from the many disciplines and current affairs Mangan draws on in his work.

Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney/Gadigal Country
5 April – 30 June 2024

Kate Beynon Awarded Yarra Arts Fellowship 2024

The inaugural Yarra Arts Fellowship has been awarded to artist Kate Beynon by the City of Yarra. This new award provides a $10,000 grant to artists working in the City of Yarra, Melbourne, in order for them to focus more intently on their practice by reducing the financial burden associated with a sustained creative practice.

With support from the fellowship, Beynon will create a body of new works that explore an interest in socially engaged space- both through her studio at Collingwood Yards and other interactive spaces in Yarra- using colour, imagination, and shared experiences.

Vivienne Binns and Elizabeth Gower at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Works by Vivienne Binns and Elizabeth Gower are included in the landmark group exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now | Part 2 at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG). On tour from the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), this exhibition follows on from the success of the first iteration that took place at the NGA in 2020.

A celebration, a commitment and a call to action, Know My Name is a gender equity initiative of the National Gallery of Australia, celebrating the work of all women artists with an aim to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now | Part 2
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
25 November 2023 – 18 February 2024

John Meade: It’s Personal! at McClelland

Through sculpture, video, and installation, John Meade draws relations between the metaphysical and surreal in the experience of contemporary life and culture. A refined and adventurous materiality defines his work, through sensuous forms and unexpected juxtapositions inflected by the erotic and uncanny.

John Meade: It’s Personal! is curated to reflect various personal threads in Meade’s work relating to alterity, including queer culture, politics, and artistic experimentation. It’s Personal! is a reflection on some of the psychological and societal drivers that have informed Meade’s life and art. The title refers to the way personal subjectivity shapes the sculptures Meade creates, and references Carol Hanisch’s seminal essay from 1970, ‘The Personal is Political’, which outlines the pragmatism of women coming together to share their personal experience as a basis for collective action.

The exhibition will feature three large new works exploring abstract form alongside key sculptures from three decades of Meade’s practice, installed across three expansive gallery spaces and outdoors at McClelland. The exhibition will coincide with Meade’s major public sculpture Love Flower (2019) being installed at McClelland as part of the Southern Way McClelland Commissions.

John Meade: It’s Personal!
McClelland Gallery, Melbourne
2 December 2023 – 25 March 2024

Kate Beynon in ‘Das Kapital’, NotFair Art Foundation

The animated video work Spirits Summoning (2023), produced by Kate Beynon, Rali Beynon and Michael Pablo (aka TudoFam) is on show at the group exhibition ‘Das Kapital’. Organised by NotFair Art Foundation, the exhibition centres around the theme of value and commerce, presenting works by over 50 artists within the vaults and halls of the former union bank in Prahran. Curated by Amanda Morgan, Kieran Boland and Brie Trenerry, this exhibition of film, video art, and new media within a physical space characterised by decay and transition draws our attention to mediums affiliated with the “immaterial” in order to question the value of cultural capital.

Combining experimental watercolour and digital techniques, Spirits Summoning features a cast of supernatural characters (adapted from the KB X RB—Mask Spirits collaborative series) brought to life as unconventional protective figures appearing amidst aquatic backdrops, kaleidoscopic serpentine patterns and botanical forms. Accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack, the work aims to create an otherworldly dreamscape to counteract troubled times.

Das Kapital
236 Chapel Street, Prahran, VIC (Former Union Bank)
30 November – 2 December 2023

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