News

Elvis Richardson is exhibiting in the inaugural Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial (KCAT), launching Friday April 13.
Artworks by ten Australian artists will be on display in unusual sites all over Kyneton.

Artist Lifestyle presents machine style, hand painted, enamel on aluminum, for shiny, capitalist marketing promises, both a sales pitch and a word of warning, depending on the target audience.  Is the artist lifestyle for you?  Anagrams of Artist Lifestyle feature on each panel and together mysteriously unpack a hidden truthfulness, underlying expectations and assumed promises within its self referential reshuffled letters.

The words generated seem to speak directly to the contested social and economic value of art and the role of being an artist today.  Artist lifestyle questions how personal, civic and national identity are formulated around artistic acts, objects and events.

Artist Lifestyle installed like real estate signs in the Kyneton Triennale comments on the global phenomenon of gentrification which is a localised form of colonialism where economically disadvantaged residents are forced to move on and out of neighborhoods and communities they contributed to developing to accommodate a new set of property owners.  The artists implication in the process of gentrification is being the visible beacon to property investors and developers to make their moves.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of James Dodd’s ‘Miller’ and Nawurapu Wunuŋmurra’s ‘Mokuy’.

The miller is a person who operates a mill, a machine traditionally employed to grind cereal into flour. Milling is one of the oldest human occupations. The mill, in essence, is any machine that processes materials via rotational grinding, crushing or cutting. Mills operate to serve a range of industries and outcomes – in this case -the mill is used to facilitate painting.

James Dodd’s thumbs have been busy operating the joysticks of a remote controller sending signals to a range of cordless drills variously attached to a kind of cobbled together gantry comprised of an old bicycle, roller blades and a variety of aluminium and timber pieces. This is the Painting Mill. Dodd has been working his Painting Mill project through a range of outcomes and presentations over recent years, experimenting with approaches and applications, developing an intimacy with his machine and it’s range of lurches and oscillations. His thumbs correspondingly channel accumulated and inherent understandings of painting substrates, pigments, mediums, viscosity, velocity and momentum.

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Nawurapu Wunuŋmurra present’s his latest body of work ‘Mokuy’.

“The mokuy or nanuk (spirits) come in together, Dhuwa and Yirritja to the sacred ground called Balambala, past Gangan, the other side for all the mokuy to get together. The spirits go there and that’s where they make the yidaki sound. It’s like showing Yukuwa (sacred yam emblem) and Morning Star feathers – they are different. Like same goes with yidaki, different sounds for Yirritja and Dhuwa. The Yirritja and Dhuwa play yidaki to call in the Mokuy to the same ground Balambala. The Yirritja mokuy come in on the birds, djilawurr (scub fowl) and bugutj-bugutj (banded fruit dove). The Dhuwa mokuy they come in from rangi side (saltwater).”

Please join us in celebrating these two artists and their latest exhibitions on the 22nd of March!

Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Sally Bourke to our represented artists!

Sally Bourke is a Newcastle based artist with a firm footing in painting, incorporating a range of techniques producing incredibly profound outcomes. An obsessive maker, Bourke has a rigorous approach to her day-to-day studio practice. These habitual processes are evident in her paintings which often depict an image archive reconciling experiences from the past. Though abstract, Bourke’s paintings are curiously recognisable, a celebration of personal encounter and memory.

Selected group and solo exhibitions include Artist Focus at Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Lake Macquarie (2018); Yarn, Newcastle University Gallery, Newcastle (2017); Brutal, The Lock Up Art Space, Newcastle (2017); Opening the Box, Tamworth Regional Art Gallery, Tamworth (2013); An Open Secret, Cessnock Regional Art Gallery, Cessnock (2013); MARITIME, The Lock Up, Newcastle (2011); Latitude, The Lock Up Art Space, Newcastle (2008) and Pandora’s Box, Newcastle Art Space, Newcastle (2006).

We congratulate Sally on all her achievements and we are thrilled to work with her in the future.

The 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art launches this week at the Art Gallery of South Australia and features a new installation by David Booth [Ghostpatrol].

Curated by Erica Green, Divided Worlds  ‘recognises that we live in troubled times. However, rather than foretelling conflict, the focus has been on assembling an exhibition that celebrates the enduring role of art and culture. Divided Worlds offers an opportunity to experience an alternative dimension – one where “difference” is the natural order of things, and a strength to be celebrated’.

“For ‘Divided Worlds’, Booth brings his world into contact with ours. His universe sweeps across the Art Gallery of South Australia walls, inviting visitors to momentarily relax the boundaries between fact and fiction by conflating elements from the two.”

David Booth [Ghostpatrol] will also be participating in START at the Gallery. Experience a live painting demonstration in the Sculpture Courtyard on Sunday 4 March, 11am – 3pm.

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: 3 March – 3 June 2018

Richard Lewer's 'History of Australia’ and Sally Bourke’s ‘Tall Tales and True’.

“Over the last few years I’ve read, researched, listened to oral histories, travelled extensively, and interviewed many people, all with the aim of immersing myself in Australia and Australian culture. Giving context to the time that I live in in Australia, I am considering its history, politics, culture, people, et cetera.” – Richard Lewer

Representing the culmination of a period of research, Lewer’s latest body of work, ‘The History of Australia’, projects a national narrative. Throughout his career, Lewer’s visual outcomes have examined the intricacies of social narratives, and offered an immersive view of experience and community. However, ‘The History of Australia’ forms a broader chronicle, summoning the chorus to which these findings contribute. ‘The History of Australia’ provides documentation and an understanding of events that Lewer believes have shaped the Australia we live in today.

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‘Tall Tales and True’ by Sally Bourke is a container for oral histories with unbelievable elements. The narrator seems to have been included in its’ stories. The silent glances of the characters belie the gravity of its heroes. Perhaps even at the expense of the truth. The painted protagonists of ‘Tall Tales and True’ ride the spectrum between Veritas, gossip, and the ironic solitude of the echo chamber.

Please join us in celebrating these two incredible exhibitions and our first of 2018!

Congratulations to Narelle Autio, Trent Parke, Matthew Bate, and Anton Andreacchio, the team behind The Summation of Force. Officially selected for the Sundance Film Festival: Mobile VR Lineup, The Summation of Force will be exhibited in January 2018 alongside an extensive international festival program.

In their creative collaboration, Parke and Autio turn their gaze to the possibilities of filmic narrative, and look to family and sport for subject material. In a moonlit suburban yard, two brothers battle one another in a mythic game of cricket. A study of the motion, physics and psychology of elite sport; a cosmic, dreamlike and darkly beautiful metaphor for life.

Previous iterations of the video piece were exhibited during 2017 at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art and in for the first time in VR (virtual reality) at the Adelaide Film Festival. 

Congratulations to Justine Varga and Paul Yore, who have been selected as Finalist for the invite-only 2017 National Self-Portrait Prize 2017! The $50,000 acquisitive prize will be exhibited at The University of Queensland Art Museum, and the theme for this year’s prize is Look at me looking at you. 

The title is from the song (I’m) Stranded by The Saints. Recorded in Brisbane in 1976, (I’m) Stranded quickly became an instant Australian cult hit and is now a classic. The Saints orbited around punk rock rather than being fully-fledged members. Their intelligent, bombastic, and pioneering attitude suits a more singular outlier vision rather than being part of any hip gang or fashionable style.

Most of the artists in Look at me looking at you are also in this spirit, revelling in aspects of the hand-made, the hand-me-down, the urgent and the everyday. They come from a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, are at different points in their careers, and create a variety of touchpoints, from celebrating the banality of the everyday through to pop music, family relationships, and the nature of identity.

The Winner will be announced at the opening of the exhibition, which runs from November 11 to February 18.

For the full list of participating artists, click here.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the exhibition opening of Vipoo Srivilasa’s This might be the place, on Thursday, October 26 from 6pm.

Srivilasa is known for his clever, quirky, zoomorphic figures, which blend the artist’s playful spirit and social conscience, just as they blend pop and folk culture.

In this unique exhibition across the entire gallery, Srivilasa will present three aspects of his practice: The Country I Miss (2012), Home (2012), and This might be the place (2017).

The exhibitions have been developed from Srivilasa’s interest in the effect of migration on people, society and the environment, as well as exploring the definition of home, and how we individually express it.

Please join us to celebrate this incredible exhibition on October 26!