International Art News

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.

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.

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

 

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.

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

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

From June 11th to October 2nd 2011 – The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
GoMA is the exclusive Australian venue for ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’, a landmark exhibition of surrealist works direct from the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
The Musée national d’art moderne, housed in Paris’s iconic Centre Pompidou, is one of the world’s best museum collections of modern and contemporary art. Its Surrealism collections are the finest in Europe — and the core of this collection is coming to GoMA. This exhibition presents more than 180 works by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ is an opportunity to see important art works that rarely leave Paris, in an exhibition that will provide a fascinating and comprehensive overview of this important artistic movement.
The exhibition presents a historical overview of Surrealism, charting its evolution from Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; to the readymade objects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s photographs.
Gaining traction in the early 1920s, the movement’s development is explored through the writings of Surrealism’s founder André Breton and key early works by André Masson. Also included is a remarkable selection of paintings and sculptures by surrealists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux.

Film and photography are also represented throughout the exhibition, including films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, René Clair and Man Ray. Important photographic works by Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Eli Lotar and Jacques-André Boiffard also feature. The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism’s influence, and includes major works by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Joseph Cornell.

Gallery Hours

16 April to 7 August 2011 – Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art
The ‘Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox’ exhibition tells the story of an artistic marriage and partnership, one of the most significant in Australian art. Both were painters of modern life at the turn of the last century, and the exhibition will explore the inflections of life and society in their work, from bustling scenes of markets and beaches, to intimate views of families, women and children.

Born in Australia, Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865–1915) married the English painter Ethel Carrick (1872–1952) in 1905 and, over the next decade, they lived in the centre of Paris, travelling through Europe, North Africa and Australia in search of exotic subjects for their expressive paintings. After Phillips Fox died suddenly in 1915, Carrick continued her career, tirelessly promoted her late husband’s work and continued to thrive on adventurous travel.

The exhibition will include approximately 100 paintings, works on paper and ephemera exploring the artists’ lives, subjects and milieu, drawn from major institutions and private collections across Australia.

Museum Hours

19 November 2010 – 13 March 2011 – Queensland Art Gallery -  Gallery of Modern Art
Scott Redford is a leading Australian artist who has firmly placed his home town, Queensland’s Gold Coast, on the contemporary art map. His intelligent and passionate investigation of vernacular visual culture has enlivened Australian art. This major solo exhibition showcases his development of the fictitious character Reinhardt Dammn in dialogue with key works from the last decade.

Scott Redford: Introducing Reinhardt Dammn’ will include surfboard sculptures, videos and paintings, suites of fibreglass objects and canvases with shiny, highly coloured acrylic surfaces. At the same time, the 10-metre signage sculpture The High / Perpetual Xmas, No Abstractions 2008 outside the Gallery of Modern Art provides a link between GoMA and the Queensland Art Gallery building, where the exhibition will be displayed.


Museum Hours