Visual Arts
There is a particular sense of anticipation surrounding Ron Mueck’s return to Australian soil – his first since 2010. An immensely popular figurative sculptor, Mueck has built an international following through his uncanny, hyperreal sculptures of the human body. Recent exhibitions in Seoul this year at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and in 2 ...
Archie Moore’s kith and kin is an immersive, dark installation created within a black-painted building – a replica of the Australian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale – that itself sits inside a voluminous wing of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The ‘pavilion’ becomes its own discrete space. An adjacent high window allows natural sunlight and views of the sky. In Venice, the doors opened to the canal; within GOMA, this sky view is as close as the installation gets to nature. Not far from the installation, however, you can overlook Maiwar/the Brisbane River; water flowing around the globe connects these two places. Once inside the exhibition space, your eyes gradually adjust to the darkness.
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Picasso/Asia: A Conversation, at M+ in Hong Kong, is simply splendid. It is innovative: not a standard chronological parade of ‘masterpieces’, but a rich and probing interrogation of the most famous European artist of the twentieth century, paired with an intelligent consideration of the impact of his work in Asia, and how it connected with Asian artists.
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Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson may well get lost in the promotion of other exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, but it is one not to be missed. Charting Crowley and Balson’s artistic journeys from the 1930s to the 1960s and their shared commitment to abstraction, it is an elegant, beautiful show that affords the rare opportunity to experience their work in depth.
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These words put the case for and against Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in a nutshell. Kihara speaks with the authority of a Pasifika, a transgender Japanese-Samoan artist who wittily restaged two dozen Gauguin paintings as colour photographs in her Paradise Camp series. Kihara dressed and posed Fa’afafine – men living and dressing in the manner of women – and her work cements the iconic status of Gauguin’s ‘wonderful’ imagery.
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