A stopped clock may be right twice a day, but can the same be said for the tabloid media? This altered cuckoo clock was exhibited alongside many other ticking timepieces as part of Fiona Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The Venice Biennale is an international display of contemporary […]
The bright, happy colours of the fanned paper sculptures in Li Hongbo’s work Gun No. 1 (2016) would not be out of place at a seven-year-old’s birthday party. But appearances are deceiving. The underlying structures of these ephemeral decorations are solid paper cutouts in the shape of bullets, hand-held pistols, and shoulder-mounted semi-automatic weapons. The rainbow […]
Head III (2007) is a profile, a sculpture and a drawing at once. It’s a work by William Kentridge (1955-), a South African artist who is interested in transformations between materials, and differences in perspectives. Kentridge works across many mediums, ranging from drawing, printmaking and animation to theatre set and costume design. He was born […]
It was in 1995, during an artist’s residency at Hyde Park Barracks, that Anne Ferran (1949-) began to make art about Australia’s past: ‘You can live in a country all your life and feels like nothing happened before you got here.’ From this emerged a practice of unearthing forgotten or unspoken history and using it […]
Amy Hill’s memory of being photographed is dulled by a haze of teenage angst. During the school holidays she had dyed her ginger hair to purple then back to what felt like a decidedly unnatural, rule-abiding maroon. During the term Amy’s art teacher approached the class to ask if they would be interested in being […]
Knowing and direct, in this self-portrait Newcastle artist Norma Allen (1918-1998) peers intently into a round mirror. Her face is solid, posed against abstract shapes of green and blue. Struck by her gaze, we gaze back. Painted in 1959, Mirror: Self-Portrait was a finalist in the 1960 Archibald Prize, the premier award for portraiture in […]
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