Art Almanac • 23rd January 2025

Amber Creswell Bell: About Face

Even though About Face is her sixth art book, the genre of portraiture is Amber Creswell Bell’s favourite.

Art Almanac • 13th September 2024

Clayful | In conversation with author Sophia Cai

Clayful, published by Street Smith Books, is an adventure into the world of miniature ceramics – a juxtaposition of form and function where artists play with clay to create tiny artworks that fit in the palm of your hand.

Art Almanac • 8th August 2024

New South: Recent painting from Southern Australia - Art Almanac

“. . . what painting in the south looks like, and who creates it.” New South, curated by Director Sebastian Goldspink at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, provides a snapshot into contemporary Australian painting by artists living in the southern parts of Australia.

Art Almanac • 4th December 2023

Primavera 2023: Young Australian Artists

“I wanted to ensure that the darkness was balanced with lightness too.” Curated by Talia Smith, Primavera 2023: Young Australian Artists explores themes of protest, perseverance, and reimagining through the works of six artists, all aged thirty-five years and under.

Art Almanac • 27th August 2023

nightshifts

“The seen and the unseen.” The “after hours” as a metaphor is explored in nightshifts at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, with the exhibition focusing on the wholistic concept of retreat – an invitation to temporary seclusion, rest, and quietness from others.

Art Almanac • 16th August 2023

Artists At Home

Inspired by great women artists, such as O’Keeffe, Kngwarreye, Bourgeois, and others, writer and photographer Karina Dias Pires presents an insight into the female role models of the Australian art industry today. Spanning a range of material, painting, photography, installation, moving images, sculpture, fibre, and ceramics, Artists at Home steps inside the homes and studios of thirty-two women artists across Australia.

Art Almanac • 9th August 2023

Rae Begley: Strange Quiet

“Strange Quiet is a meditation on time, an intimate interaction with the ecosystem of the reef, its mystery, its beauty, and its quiet fragility.”

Art Almanac • 2nd August 2023

Earth & Fire

Written by sisters Kylie and Tiffany Johnson, their second book examining the handcrafted, Earth & Fire introduces the reader to forty-five active ceramicists, their thoughts, materials, and processes when working with their chosen medium.

Art Almanac • 18th July 2023

In the studio: Thea Anamara Perkins

“. . . it’s the vulnerable parts of myself and others that I want to engage with.” Art Almanac sat down with recent La Prairie Art Award winner Thea Anamara Perkins who uses personal narratives in her highly detailed paintings that challenge misconceptions. The Sydney-based artist has just moved from her studio at Carriageworks Clothing Store into a home/portable studio in anticipation of a year of travelling, seeing art, and developing her technical skills.

Art Almanac • 17th July 2023

VISION: Art, Architecture and the National Gallery of Australia

Like the building with its commandeering cement structure, the book is oversized and bold, asking to be immediately read; and invites casual page turning through striking black and white images that fill double pages – often never-before-seen photographs from NGA’s archive, including those by renowned Australian photographers David Moore and Max Dupain.

Art Almanac • 12th July 2023

Australian Abstract

Amber Creswell Bell poses the question, “What is Abstract?” and delves into the practices of forty-one Australian abstract artists to find the answer in her fifth publication with Thames & Hudson titled Australian Abstract.

Art Almanac • 20th June 2023

TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili

ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili is a Gagana Sāmoan proverb translating to “the canoe obeys the wind,” and is the curatorial theme of the current TarraWarra Biennial as it moves across the waters to reframe the relationships between Australia and archipelagos in south/southeast Asia and south/southwest Great Ocean.

Art Almanac • 26th April 2023

In the studio: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

Working from his studio in rural Western Australia, Perth-born artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah explores life through his ‘magic realism’ style. Animals, mythology, and family history translate into artworks set in otherworldly installations that immerse the viewer. Abdullah offers a refreshing and honest take on his life as an artist, plus raising his three children in the bush.

Art Almanac • 21st February 2023

Air

“. . . what it means to breathe . . .” Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) summer blockbuster exhibition, Air, brings together an expansive collection of works by over thirty international and Australian artists, each who resist, disturb, and challenge notions of ecological harmony.

Art Almanac • 14th December 2022

Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists

Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, looks to tomorrow in a sensitive reimagining of speculative futures. The exhibition is alive, with emotions, feeling, and in sculptural form – activating the senses through textile artworks, sculptures, sound, video, smell, poetry, and documented performance.

Art Almanac • 12th November 2022

In the studio: Amber Hearn

“I felt owned by the landscape and always at home . . .” The colour-filled paintings and sculptures by Sydney-based Amber Hearn are reflective of her Annandale studio, where the artist welcomes in a kaleidoscope of hues. The composition and vividness stem from Hearn’s transient upbringing, travelling around the world with her family, living in Papua New Guinea and regional New South Wales. As such, the works transport the viewer to another place and time, evocative of memory and emotion.

Art Almanac • 3rd August 2022

In the studio: Julia Gutman

Sydney-based artist Julia Gutman revels in contradiction for her larger-than-life textile artworks. They are soft works in materiality, yet as Gutman “stabs” the textiles with her large needle, she enjoys the metaphorical “harshness” that rejects traditional polite and feminine embroidery notions. In her exhibition Muses at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney (28 July – 13 August 2022), Gutman turns on the male gaze in art history, reclaiming female bodies as she casts her friends posing in the studio, utilising clothing worn and donated by friends and family.

Art Almanac • 28th June 2022

Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island

resented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island is the Sydney-based artist’s first large-scale survey at one of Australia’s state museums. Bringing together over eighty works, the exhibition is curated by Erin Vink, curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and Isobel Parker Philip, senior curator of contemporary Australian art.

Art Almanac • 8th February 2022

Destiny Disrupted

Melbourne/Naarm-based curator, writer and scholar Nur Shkembi was invited by Talia Smith, curator at Granville Centre Art Gallery in Sydney, to present an exhibition inviting consideration from an art audience and the broader community in Western Sydney. The result is Destiny Disrupted, featuring the works of Australian-based Muslim artists: Abdul Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar, Safdar Ahmed, Elyas Alavi, Khadim Ali, Khaled Sabsabi, Omar J Sakr, Shireen Taweel, and Hossein and Nassiem Valamanesh, and Phillip George.

Art Almanac • 12th October 2021

Tarnanthi 2021

This October, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Tarnanthi’ will launch its sixth iteration of the festival that celebrates contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from across the country.