News

isa Roet’s ten-metre-tall inflatable gorilla, Baboe, is now installed atop the Apeldoorn town hall in the Netherlands.

The artwork is modelled on Bao Bao, a gorilla who lives in Apenheul Primate Park, a revolutionary cageless conservation centre where over 70 species of apes and monkeys live and roam freely in the forest.

Baboe is a collaboration with Felipe Reynolds and Airena, and is on display for 8 months in Apeldoorn.

Ildiko Kovacs is featured in issue 44 of Artist Profile, on the occasion of her survey show The DNA of Colour, now showing at Orange Regional Gallery.

The survey looks at roughly the last ten years of Kovacs’ work (since the publication of a monograph accompanying her survey show in 2011 at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery) and one of the highlights will be the emergence of a new stream of expressive, curvilinear paintings with a strongly graphic character. Sunrise (2018) and Highly Strung (2018), for example, use paint on card with boldly gestural and linear graphite lines worked into a richly textured and layered surface. Yet there is a recursive quality to this new work which links it back to work from earlier years. It is as though the marks then have transmogrified, constantly evolving into new marks, taking on different meanings as they reincarnate.

Henri Matisse once commented that the significance of an artist was to be measured by the number of new signs he has introduced into the language. A sign is an image which embodies the meanings distilled from lived experience. So, it is apt that Kovacs should say of a survey that it is ‘the luxury of bringing together a history of what I’ve gone through and the relationships that have shifted’.

Certainly, the joy of a survey that works is to recognise a recursive character to the work, enabling the viewer to appreciate not so much a progression in an artist’s work, but rather an ever-deepening and enriching exploration of visual experience, the seeds of which were there right from the beginning.

Read the full profile online.

Nana Ohnesorge’s No Picnic at Ngannelong is now showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

German-Australian artist Nana Ohnesorge was 21 years old when she saw Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock on German television. At the time, she was deeply affected by the power, spirituality, and mystery of country and its ancestors.

After moving to Australia, further research led to an understanding of significance of Hanging Rock (Ngannelong) as a site of deep spiritual significance for the Wurundjeri people and for the Taungurung and Dja dja wurrung peoples.

In No Picnic at Ngannelong, Ohnesorge presents Joan Lindsay, author of the 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, as the creator of a myth which has perpetuated through time and continues to draw visitors to the distinctive geological formation.

The cameo format of Ohnesorge’s works reflect the domestic Victorian interior of the Lindsay Family Sitting Room which is on view on the ground floor of the Gallery. The recreation the sitting room from the Lindsay’s family home Lisnacrieve in Creswick, was an initiative by Daryl Lindsay, a member of the famous, creative Creswick family.

Exhibition runs until August 4.

Ildiko Kovacs’ The DNA of Colour is now showing at Orange Regional Gallery. Curated by Sioux Garside, the exhibition will tour to the ANU Drill Hall Gallery after its run at Orange Regional Gallery.

In thinking about Kovacs’ abstract paintings I was struck by the resemblance of her spiralling lines to the coils of DNA. Her rippling forms seem to twist into a vortex or follow an unravelling double helix pattern. The DNA code is a metaphor for the way these paintings unfold and move with colour, sparked by an excavation of inner feelings and intuition…Rippling is a term that scientists used to describe the movement of gravitational waves first discovered as ‘ripples in the fabric of space-time’ by Albert Einstein in 1905–08.

Exhibition runs until June 18 at Orange Regional Gallery.

Purchase the beautiful cloth-bound, full-colour, 236-page publication here.

Hugo Michell Gallery is thrilled to announce South Australian collaboration, Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe has been selected as one of only 21 Official Collateral Events of the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2019.

Curated by Dr Lisa Slade, Living Rocks is a South Australian collaboration between James Darling & Lesley Forwood, Jumpgate VR, composer Paul Stanhope, and the Australian String Quartet. The Art Gallery of South Australia is the Official Promoter of Living Rocks.

Living Rocks, the only Australian project selected addresses the question: what was our planet three billion years ago? It celebrates the cosmic imperative of microbes in action through the universe, most notably their survival by way of the great events of extinction that have happened or are still to come on our planet.

In Living Rocks, water floods the Magazzini del Sale, the historic stone salt storehouses of Venice that have stood the test of many an inundation. From an extensive pool emerge thrombolites that have been crafted, not by unimaginable time and the force of nature, but by the artists who employ the distinctive roots of an arid land eucalypt to create living rocks.

“The installation connects the present day to the beginning of life. It is a memory of our origin and a prophesy of our future.”  – JAMES DARLING

Show your support for this South Australian first with a donation to the project. Donations are tax deductible through the Australian Cultural Fund.

Trent Parke and Justine Varga are now showing in Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.

‘Defining Place/Space’ represents the current state of contemporary photography in Australia through the work of thirteen artists. The exhibiting artists were nominated by esteemed Australian curators of photography, and ultimately selected by MOPA’s Chief Curator Deborah Klochko.

Exhibition runs until September 22.

Fiona McMonagle and Justine Varga are now showing in Ways of Seeing at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“With a primary focus on contemporary works, Ways of Seeing highlights over 100 recent acquisitions to the collection.”

Exhibition runs until April 22 in Galleries 9, 10, and 11 at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Sera Waters’ Going Round in Squares is now showing at Ararat Gallery TAMA.

The artworks of Going Round in Squares explore ideas around the grids and boundary lines which have governed life in Australia since colonisation. Roads, fence lines, walls, furniture, and even social boundaries reinforce ways of being I have come to call a ‘geometric discipline’. Textile practice especially, performed atop the gridded warp and weft of fabric, is a form of discipline that has historically shaped women’s lives, their education, and opportunities. As women have traditionally been the makers of homes, my artworks re-work textile traditions to explore the disciplining roles of neatness, order, pattern, binding, and containment, all ideas associated with the domestic.
Each artwork of this exhibition carries a narrative grown from evidence left behind by my ancestors who settled (invaded) and made their many homes in South Australia and Victoria from 1838 onwards. They left behind their particular geometric legacies and altered regions irrevocably in the form of clearing land and the importation of non-native species. Undoubtedly their making of homes un-homed others.
…
By re-working domestic materials and traditions, I mine them for knowledge and to break out of restrictive habits, and re-direct these traditions into new trajectories which recognise our ongoing colonising modes in order to shift them for future generations.

Exhibition runs until June 30.