International Art News

John RUSSELL
Peonies and head of a woman (c. 1887)
oil on canvas – 40.7 x 65.0 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 2004.218

15 Jun 2013 to 06 Oct 2013 – National Gallery of Victoria
For the first time, the story of the Australian artists who lived in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is presented in an exhibition of over 130 stunning works of art. Australian Impressionists in France challenges our understanding of Australian art during these revolutionary decades.

Beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the twentieth century, many of the best and brightest art students left Australia to continue their studies in Paris, the undisputed world capital of the arts. In France the Australians became part of the large community of French and foreign artists who were changing the course of art.

Charles Conder
England 1868–1909, lived in Australia 1884–90, Europe 1890–1905
Mrs Conder in pink c.1901- oil on canvas – 48.0 x 44.3 cm
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester
Purchased by the Friends of the Museum, 1956 (L.F43.1956)
© Leicester Arts & Museums/The Bridgeman Art Library

Claude Monet demonstrated his Impressionist technique to John Russell; Charles Conder trawled the cabarets of Montmartre with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; and Vincent van Gogh considered Russell a friend. In France, Australian artists engaged in personal and artistic exchanges with artists from around the world.

The exhibition shows that during these years Australian art took place beyond the confines of Australia, and examines how the expatriate artists were part of the story of Impressionism in Australia. Through the inclusion of key works by French, British and American artists the exhibition also places the Australians’ work within an international context of Impressionist art.

Australian Impressionists in France brings together over 130 paintings, prints and drawings from major public and private collections around the world. It includes important paintings by John Russell, E.Phillips Fox and Charles Conder, as well as never before seen works by lesser-known artists.

National Gallery of Victoria

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011 | Animation: 3:17 minutes, colour, sound, 16:9, ed. 2/8 | Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © Deborah Kelly. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2012

Until 22 July 2012 – Gallery of Modern Art
‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ — the second in the Gallery’s Contemporary Australia exhibition series — celebrates the diversity, energy and innovation of contemporary women artists working in this country today.

Deborah Kelly | Australia b.1962 | Beastliness (still) 2011

This exhibition acknowledges the strong history of work by women artists and recognises the ways that their critical, provocative, unexpected and illuminating contributions have reshaped, and continue to shape, the landscape of contemporary art. It features more than 70 new and recent works, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles, video and performance by 33 artists and collectives, a total of 56 visual artists.

Jennifer Mills | What’s in a name? (detail), 2009–11 | Mixed media on paper 323 drawings, varying dimensions Installed dimensions variable Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Photograph: Natasha Harth

The exhibition also includes Embodied Acts, a program of performative works; the Children’s Art Centre installation art work ‘Fly Away Home’ by Fiona Hall; and a film program curated by renowned Australian producer and critic Margaret Pomeranz, AM.

GOMA

Edgar Degas | Danseuse assise, penchée en avant, elle se masse le pied gauche (Dancer sitting, leaning forward, she massages her left foot) 1881–83 | Caillebotte legacy in Luxembourg, 1894 | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © Hervé Lewandowski | © RMN (RF22712)/Musée d’Orsay

Until June 24, 2012 – Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
‘Modern Woman: Daughters and Lovers 1850 — 1918 | Drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’, an exhibition of drawings from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Eugène Boudin | France 1824–98 | La Dame en bleu (Woman in blue)1860–70 | Beige paper, pencil, watercolour | Bequest of Carle Dreyfus, 1953 | RF 29980, Recto | Collection: Musée d’Orsay, Paris | Photograph: © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Jean Schormans

It celebrates the changing roles of women during the Belle Époque as depicted by leading artists of the time such as Edgar Degas, Pierre—Auguste Renoir, Edouard Vuillard, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot and Jean François Millet. These artists increasingly abandoned idealised representations of the female figure, and turned to women from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds, depicting them in their family lives and domestic activities, as well as in the public realm as spectators, performers and workers. Through these fascinating drawings, we see French society undergoing radical transformation.

Gallery Hours

Craig Handley - who'sthatcrankybastard - oil on canvas - 66 x 76 cm

10 March – 28 March – Gallery Richard Martin
Craig Handley’s work has already found its way into private collections around Australia as well as overseas to Hong Kong, New York, Scotland and Singapore.

Craig Handley- incoming - oil on canvas - 76 x 92 cm

“I like … enigmatic and mysterious subject matter; the frozen, unreal atmosphere of a stage or film set; to deliberately juxtapose elements to aim for uneasy mood; to create a slightly unsettling feeling of the familiar but yet unknown.
My work is a medley, a collage of all the things I come across while travelling about. They are rearrangements, a hodgepodge of places and objects and light. Painting for me is also about introspection, an attempt to make sense of all the imagery of my mind and cobble it together into a painting; I like to delve into my personal history, both the emotional and the visual. My early training as a sign writer ingrains a tight control that is hard to shake. The years spent telling stories visually in animation give my work that ‘here is the camera’ sort of feel.”

Gallery Hours

Heidrun Löhr, Traffic, 2001, Nalina Wait and Alexandra-Katie Macdonald at Omeo Dance Studio, Sydney. Courtesy the artist

From March 3rd to the 15th of April 2012 – Australian Centre for Photography
Parallax is a simple enough problem for photography: the image you make depends on your viewing angle. But when you add the variable of the moving body in performance, the parallax factor multiplies to a point where the camera captures something no human eye will ever see in any other way.

Heidrun Löhr, the celebrated photographer of live performance, is famous for her active use of the camera around the stage. More than documents of a vanishing work, the images open up a whole terrain of performance photography, where the gestures and expressions of subjects from all walks of life perform a sense of identity. An identity that can be as multiple and various as the positions of the camera.

Heidrun Löhr’s career began in Munich and Berlin but for over 25 years now she has worked in Sydney. Her photographs capture some of the most bizarre, outrageous and beautiful moments in experimental performance in this city.

Centre Hours

From  February 25th to March 27th, 2012 – The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
As part of the official 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival visual arts program, CACSA presents two solo exhibitions from renowned Asian artist/filmmakers: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Yang Fudong.

Loosely based on a text published in 1983 by the abbot of a Buddhist temple in Apichatpong’s home town of Khon Kaen, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee tells the reportedly true story of a man who claimed that he could remember his past lives while meditating. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee functions as a personal letter from the filmmaker to Uncle Boonmee. “Uncle… I have been here for a while. I would like to see a movie about your life. So I proposed a project about reincarnation.” A camera glides through deserted houses. The voices of three men are heard telling Boonmee about an abandoned village. The wind blows fiercely through the buildings, bringing a swarm of bugs. As evening approaches, the sky turns dark, the bugs scatter and the men are silent.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is part of a larger project called Primitive which includes six other video works, two short films and his acclaimed feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010. The project deals with themes of memories, transformation and extinction, and touches on a violent 1965 Thai army crack down on communist sympathisers in the village Nabua in Nakhon Phanom, just by the border to Laos.
Apichatpong Weerasthakul was born in Bangkok and grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began making film and video shorts in 1994, exhibiting installation work internationally since 1998, and completed his first feature in 2000. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, commissioned by Animate Projects, Haus der Kunst, Munich and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool, and was awarded the following prizes: Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen and Prize of the Jury, 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; and Best Film, Prize of the Jury of the Pernambuco Association of Filmmakers, Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, Brasil. In 2010 Apichatpong was also a nominee for the Hugo Boss Award.

Yang Fudong’s five part series Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest is concerned with a group of young urban intellectuals in their 20s and 30s coming to terms with their ambiguous position in contemporary China, and their desire for individual freedom in the shifting context of an emerging capitalist economy. His works investigate the structure and formation of identity through myth, personal memory and lived experience and as such present a dramatic existential experience for the viewer.

Seven Intellectuals focuses on a group of rebellious scholars and artists based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They rejected the lessons of Confucianism, which taught that public commitment brought virtue and instead pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty.

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing and graduated from the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou. Yang has featured in the following biennales: Documenta XI in 2002; Venice Biennale, 2003 and 2007; 1st Prague Biennale 2003; 5th Shanghai Biennale 2004; Carnegie International 2005; 1st Sharjah Biennale 2005; and the Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery) in 2006. Yang’s institutional projects include exhibitions at: ARC/Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 2003; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2005; Castello di Rivoli, Torino 2005. Yang Fudong is represented by ShangART Gallery, Shanghai and Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Art Center Hours