Art Guide Australia

Art Guide Australia is a print and online magazine exploring contemporary Australian art. Our editors and our team of writers and contributors know the local art scene and keep you informed through engaging and thoughtful articles. We speak with artists, curators and gallerists to learn more about their ideas and share them with an audience who want to know more about Australian art and what to see. We’re here to support a vibrant and diverse arts community and our aim is to provide independent, considered editorial coverage alongside a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the visual arts across Australia.

A Note From the Editor

Art Guide Australia

Issue 163 Contributors

Previews • A roundup of essential exhibitions, handpicked by our editors.

Perth/Boorloo

Hobart/nipaluna

Newcastle/Mulubinba

Brisbane/Meanjin

Melbourne/Naarm

Canberra/Ngambri Country

Adelaide/Kaurna Country

Darwin/Larrakia Country

Adelaide/Kaurna Country

A Moveable Feast • An exhibition headlining the Canberra Art Biennial is part of a broader artistic program exploring food networks and the cultural practices that are intertwined with them.

Justene Williams • Justene Williams is known for harnessing sculpture, performance and video into eclectic, eccentric, movement-filled, feminist reimaginings of art history, across a three-decade practice. Ahead of her survey exhibition Once We Were Mudskippers, titled for a small fish that moves over both water and land using fins as legs, Williams invited us into her East Brisbane studio to muse on the surreality of looking back to go forward.

A CONSTELLATION OF IDEAS • One of the inaugural exhibitions at Powerhouse Parramatta brings the celestial stories of Indigenous artists from rural India into broader conversations about space exploration, through a major mural commission.

PRETEND NOT TO PRETEND • Sydney-based artist Michael Lindeman has been practicing his distinctive style of wry institutional critique for close to 30 years. His works—large-scale paintings, drawings and sculptures, often utilising text and colour—interrogate both the contemporary art world and his place in it. He has a way with words, and he wields them in a manner that is occasionally scathing and often hilarious. Ahead of his latest solo exhibition I Could Be Wrong at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney, we asked Lindeman 20 questions about what makes him laugh, the challenges facing the art world today, and the advice he gives to his students.

Material Possibilities • A first-time finalist in the prestigious Telstra NATSIAAs, Janet Kalidjan Marawarr’s four-decade painting and printmaking practice has taken her across the globe, while remaining grounded in Country.

Who’s That Girl? • Through paintings imbued with the aesthetics of classic cinema and fashion photography, artist Micheila Petersfield explores how identity is constructed in the space between artifice and reality.

Other Dimensions • The second edition of the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, featuring artists responding to historical architectural surroundings, makes the case for this important but increasingly sidelined medium.

On Seeing and Unseeing Hockney • The beloved artist David Hockney was synonymous with paintings that have become part of our cultural imaginary. But as Joseph Earp writes, there is a tension between their smoothly familiar surfaces and hidden depths.

Busting Down the Doors of Isolation • An exhibition in the Western Australian capital is the culmination of an ambitious regional arts triennial that comprised a constellation of future-focussed projects across this vast State.

A–Z Exhibition Listings • What to see in Melbourne and regional Victoria throughout September and October.

A–Z Exhibition...