The NGV has already declared its fourth Triennial a blockbuster. It may well draw enormous crowds when it opens in December, but that will tell us how many people went, not how good the exhibition was. For a gallery with the NGV’s reputation, there is more at stake than attendance figures. A major survey can damage that reputation as readily as enhance it.

This year’s Biennale of Sydney did more than damage its reputation. It disgraced itself, and poor art was only part of the problem. DJ Haram’s antisemitic rant at an opening event, Feras Shaheen’s public description of Jewish philanthropists as Nazis, and donor withdrawals left the institution’s reputation in tatters. The Biennale said the performer’s remarks were neither commissioned nor approved. It could disown those remarks. It could not so easily explain how its exhibition had become so closely identified with a political outlook so extreme that it discredited the Biennale itself.

Australia is fortunate to have institutions able to undertake exhibitions of this scale. The Biennale’s failures do not diminish the need for it, any more than the NGV’s popularity exempts its exhibitions from criticism. The gallery has shown work I still think about, alongside attractions whose novelty soon wore off. Several artists in this Triennial make it an exhibition I want to see.

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The invited artists are impressive. Jenny Holzer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Zanele Muholi and Sarah Sze would be substantial inclusions in any international survey. They join Shilpa Gupta, Mika Rottenberg, Wu Tsang and Kent Monkman, alongside Australian artists including Christian Thompson, Angelina Karadada Boona and Juan Ford. There is considerable variety here, even among the better-known names. Tillmans will bring photographs ranging from abstraction to portraits and club scenes; Muholi, internationally recognised for photography, will exhibit a monumental sculpture. These are reasons to go, although reputations alone cannot tell us how the exhibition will work.

Amita Kirpalani’s account of the selection is encouraging. She told Broadsheet that the curators had chosen the artists before settling on a strict theme, finding connections as the exhibition developed. This allows the curators to discover something they had not anticipated, rather than recruit artists to illustrate an argument already settled. Artists might even be grateful to have been invited for something they made.

Transformation is the theme. Materials, technology, culture, politics, society and the individual all qualify. One could probably get most of the NGV’s collection through that entrance, along with the redevelopment outside. That tells us very little about why these particular artists were chosen.

Artists might even be grateful to have been invited for something they made.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s pink Old Tree leads the NGV’s announcement. The original stood on New York’s High Line in 2023–24; a smaller version appeared at Art Basel in 2025. Both preceded the NGV’s April announcement. Another monumental version was unveiled in Venice this May. The NGV describes its forthcoming sculpture as a new iteration. Many visitors in Melbourne will be seeing her work for the first time. But a familiar international attraction is a peculiar choice to introduce a new Triennial.

Opening on 13 December, the fourth Triennial will occupy all four levels of NGV International, with free admission until 11 April 2027. Painting, photography, sculpture, film, fashion and design will share the building and its historical collections. The programme ranges from a fifteen-metre painted triptych by Juan Ford to Ocean Vuong’s photographs of his mother’s nail salon.

Ford’s paintings combine exacting realism with subjects that look improvised or damaged. Native vegetation is bound with tape, while figures are entangled with branches and manufactured debris. In The Reorientalist (2013), the artist appears caught up in the same wrapping and improvised equipment as his botanical subjects. He paints these makeshift constructions with the precision we might expect of a botanical illustrator describing a newly discovered species.

I am more interested in these inventions than in the scale of the new commission. Ford depicts things that nature has never supplied, bringing landscape, botanical study and portraiture into peculiar combinations. Plants and people are bound up with materials that suggest our clumsy attempts to repair or control them.

The triptych will be installed among the NGV’s British Royal Academy and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Ford will have company in his use of botanical detail and invented scenes. The older painters also used carefully observed plants and elaborate costumes to make improbable subjects believable.

Ocean Vuong is better known as a poet and novelist, but his contribution to the Triennial began with a camera borrowed in 2009. Writing in Cultured, he described taking it to his mother Rose’s nail salon that July. He recorded work, meals, idle moments and the care of a young child. He intended to return in another season. Three months later, his mother had declared bankruptcy and sold the business.

He had photographed an ordinary working day in a place he expected to visit again. Its disappearance changes how those images are understood. Routines he had thought he could photograph again became records of a business that no longer existed. The salon pictures will be shown with photographs made with Vuong’s brother years later, after their mother’s death. The earlier photographs preserve activities whose end he had not foreseen; the later ones were made in the knowledge of loss.

Vuong also described recognising how a photograph excludes information, leaving viewers to imagine what continues outside the frame. Family photographs often leave us wondering who has been included, who is missing and what happened before or afterwards. I want to see how he uses those exclusions, and how the later photographs change our reading of the earlier ones. His account explains the circumstances in which they were made. It cannot settle what I will think of them.

Many visitors will bring memories of earlier NGV surveys to this one. We have become accustomed to something enormous, something technologically ingenious and something to do as well as inspect. Once those attractions become fixtures, curators may start looking for artists to supply them. A commission can answer the requirements of the event very efficiently while giving us little reason to remember the artist.

My doubts about the NGV’s large surveys go back to the first Melbourne Now in 2013. I remember encountering Peter Tyndall’s display at the entrance and thinking of wire coat hangers. I thought it a feeble choice to greet visitors and was tempted to turn round. This was supposed to introduce me to the city’s art, and I had scarcely begun before wondering whether I wanted to continue. I support the idea of a major exhibition devoted to work being made in Melbourne. That made such a weak opening all the more disappointing.

John McDonald had similar reservations when he reviewed the inaugural Melbourne Now in January 2014. He criticised its self-congratulation and the selection of drawings through John Nixon’s personal and professional networks. Yet he also recognised Ellwood’s attempt to bring the gallery closer to artists and audiences, and singled out work by Daniel Crooks, Lucy McRae, Gareth Sansom and others. His review distinguished the value of the undertaking from the uneven quality of what had been selected. Supporting the exhibition’s purpose did not oblige him to admire everything in it.

Troy Emery’s Mountain climber (2022), shown in the 2023 edition, was another matter. I thought it was terrific. The enormous feline, covered in brightly coloured pom-poms, was sumptuous and peculiar. Its familiar animal body was an improbable support for so much synthetic decoration. My admiration for it did not extend to everything around it.

Admiring Emery’s sculpture did not stop me wondering who had been left out. Sasha Grishin’s review of the 2023 exhibition in The Conversation treated debate about omissions as pointless, given the abundance of interesting work included. I disagree. An exhibition proposing an account of Melbourne’s art must be examined for what it excludes as well as what it exhibits. An omitted artist may expose a limitation in the curators’ account. Filling the building does not settle that question.

The 2023 Design Wall exposed how loosely Melbourne Now had been defined. It assembled consumer products from twenty-five design studios, including homewares, sporting equipment and healthcare products. These deserve examination for their usefulness, manufacture and technical ingenuity. Those criteria cannot simply be transferred to painting or sculpture. Putting everything in the same exhibition does not establish a relationship between them. The gallery needs to explain its choices more precisely than by celebrating Melbourne’s creativity. Once the purpose is to congratulate Melbourne, almost anything will do.

Filling the building does not settle that question.

Tony Ellwood has brought international work to a large public and made the NGV an institution Melbourne follows closely. John McDonald’s February 2024 review of the third Triennial was emphatic about its achievements. He praised the variety and quality of the work, discussing the Maningrida weaving Mun-dirra, Sheila Hicks’s fibre sculpture and installations by Julian Charrière and Franziska Furter. His praise extended to Pilat’s robot dogs, which he found engaging. His review gives a fair account of the exhibition’s strengths, even where his enthusiasm differs from mine. The NGV has supplied ample evidence that a popular exhibition can contain excellent art. That makes scrutiny of its less successful choices more necessary, not less.

Ron Mueck’s Mass (2016–17), commissioned for the inaugural Triennial, remains one of the NGV’s memorable achievements. Its hundred enlarged skulls were deliberately installed among the historical paintings. Their scale and number made an anatomical object familiar from pictures and medical illustrations into something we had to walk among. We could distinguish one skull from another while recognising the same structure repeated throughout the room. That combination of individual variation and common anatomy made the installation disturbing.

The placement was part of its conception. We could compare the faces, costumes and social distinctions in the portraits with the remains common to their sitters. The sitters’ clothes and expressions had been preserved in paint long after their bodies had decayed. Mueck’s use of the historical galleries gave the installation associations it would not have acquired in an empty room. It also made the portraits worth reconsidering. I remember the work for that encounter, as well as for its size.

I had little patience for Agnieszka Pilat’s Heterobota in the 2023 Triennial, and not simply because the robot dogs regularly broke down. Watching them stall against walls while curators dashed to the rescue was quite amusing. Even when functioning, though, their ability to play, rest and make paintings did little for me. McDonald found them engaging. I found their antics tedious. The NGV’s account speculated that future sentient machines might regard their paintings as the prehistoric artefacts of their ancestors. This was quite a responsibility to place upon a few marks on canvas. The gallery had plenty to say about what the paintings might mean to future machines, and much less about why we should bother with them now.

The machines could apply paint to canvas. Truth be told, I preferred the dexterity of the elephants painting at Melbourne Zoo. I wanted more from the paintings than proof that a robot could make them. The NGV now owns Heterobota scroll paintings. Their acquisition leaves the museum with objects whose continuing interest will have to be assessed after the performing machines have gone. How much will there be to see once the circumstances of their production have been explained? I would have liked to come away better informed, if not wiser, with apologies to F. E. Smith. I didn’t.

McDonald praised the NGV’s Triennial but was scathing about Sydney’s Rememory. Returning to the Sydney exhibition in June, he described it as an exercise in “institutional self-harm”. He acknowledged Hoor Al Qasimi’s curatorial credentials and her ability elsewhere to combine politics with other subjects. In Sydney, he found weak work, a relentless political emphasis and too little variety. Artists addressing political subjects need not produce an exhibition in which the conclusions are so predictable.

Christopher Allen was equally critical of what he saw at White Bay. He described weak art overwhelmed by the industrial setting, excessively long videos and meanings asserted in labels that he could not find in the objects. Daisy Quezada Ureña’s lantern-like ceramics were his telling example. Their visual appeal conveyed little of the elaborate account of exclusion supplied by the label. Historical paintings also require explanation. A useful label can tell us why an artist chose a subject or used a particular material. But if exclusion is the subject, we should be able to ask how the ceramics express it.

At White Bay, getting through the exhibition could mean seeing only fragments of individual works. Gina Fairley’s ArtsHub review described works dwarfed by the machinery and a concentration of demanding video that encouraged incomplete viewing. A curator who selects an hour-long film for a sprawling group exhibition has to consider how anyone will watch it. Visitors who arrive halfway through, sample a few minutes and move on will miss much of its argument. Installing the equipment and getting the film to play are only the beginning of the curator’s responsibility to the work.

These were among the failures that made Rememory a disastrous example of the international survey. They do not discredit the Biennale of Sydney’s purpose or its history. An organisation able to bring unfamiliar art to Australia deserves better than an exhibition in which poor selection, unsuitable placement and inflated explanations undermine the artists’ work. The NGV must give its artists better conditions than that, and make no excuses for work that fails.

Allen’s criticism also concerns what galleries promise their visitors. In his recent essay in The Australian, “How Australia’s great art galleries became glorified theme parks”, he rejects the idea that attracting a crowd means creating a community. He questions immersive experiences that entertain visitors without improving their understanding, contrasting them with the continuing relationships sustained by regional galleries. A gathering of strangers passing through the same attraction does not necessarily acquire any common interest in art. Its members may leave as disconnected as they arrived.

Allen is right. Photographs of a busy gallery do not establish that its visitors form a community. A roomful of people can operate the same device and leave with nothing to discuss. Two people disagreeing about a painting may continue the conversation over dinner. Counting participants will not tell us whether anything worth discussing happened between them.

Rineke Dijkstra’s Night Watching (2019) will give us actual conversations to consider. The three-screen video records fourteen groups responding to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Schoolgirls speculate about the identity of a figure; young artists imagine what making the painting must have involved. Some observations draw on knowledge, others on guesswork. A detail prompts a question, somebody supplies information, and another person ventures an interpretation. There is a welcome lack of solemnity in some of the responses to so revered a painting.

These exchanges complicate Allen’s distinction between a crowd and a community. The participants need not agree, or know much about Rembrandt, to point out something another person has missed. Visitors watching them might feel more willing to question the pictures in the next room. Scholarship has given us an immense amount of information about The Night Watch, without exhausting what people find to discuss before it. Dijkstra records people trying to work out what they think, with all the hesitation, guesswork and disagreement that involves.

Louise Paramor’s thirty-two human-height chess pieces in the Great Hall should produce a less reverential gathering. Melbourne has long used that room to lie down and contemplate the ceiling; encouraging it to stand up and think several moves ahead seems reasonable. I want to see how Paramor gives the pieces character while making each recognisable within the game. Their scale allows sculptural inventions that a player must also be able to distinguish across the room.

Chess gives participation a precise purpose. The pieces have different powers, the players observe rules, and one person’s decision changes what another can do. Paramor has to accommodate those practical requirements while making sculptures worth inspecting between moves. A good joke about a bishop will be of limited use if nobody can identify the rook. There should be time to examine both while somebody takes an unconscionably long time over a decision.

The NGV’s galleries give its curators more control over viewing conditions than White Bay’s industrial halls. Dijkstra’s film runs for thirty-five minutes. Visitors need to be able to stay with the conversations without obstructing the next group or losing the sound to an adjoining installation. Paintings and interactive works make different demands on the same building. The museum’s advantages will count for little if the exhibition is arranged chiefly to keep people moving through it.

The NGV has announced that more than seventy projects will enter its collection. Some will be shown in different company long after this Triennial has closed. These are long-term choices about which artists the NGV will represent and what future visitors will be able to see. The curators need to consider how each acquisition adds to what the museum already owns, as well as what it contributes to this exhibition.

Free admission makes several visits possible, with a different artist becoming the reason for each. That is a considerable advantage in an exhibition too large to absorb in an afternoon. It would be good to leave wanting to return to a particular work, rather than relieved to have reached the end. The NGV can help by making it easy to spend time with individual artists without feeling obliged to complete the entire circuit.

There are artists here I want to see. Kirpalani’s account suggests a selection made through an interest in their work, with the curatorial explanation developed afterwards. That is a good beginning. The NGV must now exhibit the work properly and resist claiming more for it than the artists have achieved. Its resources and public standing make that responsibility greater. It has already promised a blockbuster. It still has to give us a good exhibition.

NGV Triennial 2026, NGV International, Melbourne, 13 December 2026 – 11 April 2027. Free entry.

Sources

• National Gallery of Victoria: NGV Triennial 2026 exhibition information and programme announcement, 15 April 2026; collection and exhibition notes on Ron Mueck’s Mass, Agnieszka Pilat’s Heterobota and Heterobota Scroll #2, and Design Wall, Melbourne Now 2023.

• Lily Beamish, “The NGV Triennial Is Back – Here Are the Names to Know”, Broadsheet, 15 April 2026.

• John McDonald, “Melbourne Now”, 11 January 2014; “NGV Triennial 3”, 10 February 2024; “25th Biennale of Sydney: Part 1”, 21 March 2026, and “Part 2”, 5 June 2026.

• Christopher Allen, review of the 2026 Biennale of Sydney, The Australian, 23 April 2026; “How Australia’s great art galleries became glorified theme parks”, The Australian, 30 October 2026.

• Gina Fairley, review of the 2026 Biennale of Sydney, ArtsHub, 13 March 2026.

• Sasha Grishin, review of Melbourne Now, The Conversation, 24 March 2023, republished by ArchitectureAu.

• Juan Ford, The Reorientalist, exhibition catalogue, 2013.

• Ocean Vuong, Cultured, 27 June 2024.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them

No. 4 / 2026

Seven exhibitions that have caught my attention, and why I think they’re worth seeing.

Euan Macleod — In Darkness Let Me Dwell

King Street Gallery on William, Sydney | Runs to 21 November 2026

In Fire in Cave Rock (2026), a small fire burns inside an enormous opening in the rock, while the last of the daylight catches the sea beyond. The place is Cave Rock at Sumner Beach in Christchurch, a landmark Euan Macleod has known since childhood. He returned to it during the final months of his mother’s life, and it has become the subject of several paintings in his new exhibition. Here, in a place he knows intimately, the landscape carries a more personal history.

Born in Christchurch in 1956 and based in Sydney since 1981, Macleod has won the Archibald, Sulman and Blake prizes. His paintings frequently feature solitary figures climbing, wandering or struggling through landscapes of imposing physical presence. Sometimes these figures resemble the artist himself, although they are seldom conventional self-portraits. Macleod has developed a distinctive approach to painting in which the figure and its surroundings are inseparable.

The exhibition takes its title from ‘In darkness let me dwell’ (1610), a song by the English composer John Dowland. Its melancholy is well suited to these paintings of the Christchurch coast, where much of the activity takes place in the uncertain light of early morning or evening. Figures walk their dogs, carry umbrellas or make their way along the shore. In one painting, a man pushes a woman in a wheelchair beside the sea. Such ordinary activities acquire considerable poignancy through the circumstances in which the pictures were made.

Macleod’s painting can be rough and physically demanding. His rocks have weight, his seas are frequently forbidding, and his figures sometimes appear barely capable of standing against the weather. Yet he is equally capable of great delicacy, particularly in his treatment of distant light and the subtle changes of colour along a coastline. His paintings are built through prolonged working and revision, with an occasional awkwardness that seems entirely appropriate to their subjects.

These new pictures are among Macleod’s most personal, although he has never been a painter inclined to easy sentiment. The small fire burning inside Cave Rock seems especially poignant, offering a little warmth against the encroaching darkness. There is no attempt to dramatise grief or turn these familiar places into symbols of loss. Macleod has found sufficient expression in the changing light, the weather and the physical presence of this familiar coastline. There is no need for the paintings to explain more than they show.

William Robinson — Landscapes, Interiors & Farmyards

Australian Galleries, Sydney | Runs to 14 November 2026

William Robinson turns the landscape almost upside down in The Ant Tree (1992). Trees descend from above, distant mountains occupy the lower part of the picture, and the sky appears between great masses of vegetation. It is a remarkably convincing invention, achieved by a painter who discovered that conventional perspective could never adequately describe the country he wanted to paint.

Robinson, who died in August 2025 aged 89, twice won both the Archibald and Wynne prizes. Born in Brisbane in 1936, he spent much of his early career teaching while painting interiors, still lifes and the cows, goats and poultry that populated his small farm. His farmyard paintings are wonderfully funny, although Robinson himself was initially rather less impressed with them.

In a revealing 1994 interview with Lou Klepac, reproduced in the exhibition catalogue, Robinson recalled struggling with his early paintings of cows. He admired Bonnard enormously, but eventually realised that his own subjects required something beyond the French painter’s example. Cézanne was another important influence, particularly in his understanding of how a picture could be constructed. Giving up teaching proved decisive, allowing him to devote himself entirely to painting.

The exhibition includes The Ant Tree, Purlingbrook in morning sun (1998) and the magnificent Seascape with morning star (2006). There are also interiors and farmyard subjects. Robinson’s cows and poultry were never merely amusing diversions. They helped him discover how to make pictures from the life immediately around him, long before he began painting the extraordinary landscapes for which he became famous.

David Milne — Telepathy

Jacob Hoerner Galleries, St Kilda, Melbourne | 12 November – 19 December 2026

Circles, squares and triangles have occupied artists for centuries, although few have pursued their possibilities quite as persistently as David Milne. His paintings contain intricate geometric arrangements, sometimes resembling astronomical charts, architectural plans or the mysterious diagrams found in seventeenth-century alchemical engravings. In Arrangements & Consensus (2025), a great black angular construction dominates a brilliant red field, while two slender red forms rise beside it. Elsewhere, circles are filled with coloured triangles and smaller shapes, some resembling mosaics. The contrast between these densely worked areas and the enormous, almost architectural black form is particularly striking. The painting has an extraordinary variety of colour and scale, although the most surprising feature is how comfortably these unlikely elements occupy the same picture.

Born in Aberdeen in 1946, Milne came to Australia in 1966 and studied at the National Art School in Sydney. He has exhibited extensively here and overseas, developing a highly individual form of hard-edge abstraction informed by mathematics, geometry and the history of religious symbolism. His interests extend from Renaissance studies of proportion to the spiritual preoccupations of twentieth-century abstract painters. Such influences help explain the unusual character of his work, particularly his fascination with what can be accomplished using relatively simple geometric forms.

Milne’s technical accomplishment is evident in the exceptionally clean edges of his shapes and the consistency of his colour. There is no uncertainty about where one form ends and another begins, even in the smallest and most intricate areas. Yet the paintings are anything but mechanical. In Arrangements & Consensus, the great black construction appears almost three-dimensional, while the brightly coloured circles are unmistakably flat. Milne has made something of this contradiction, allowing different kinds of pictorial space to coexist without attempting to reconcile them.

There is something wonderfully unfashionable about an artist so thoroughly absorbed in the possibilities of geometric forms. Milne has continued to pursue interests that place him somewhat apart from the more familiar accounts of Australian abstract painting. His fascination with the relationship between mathematical order and spiritual belief has led him towards sources that many contemporary painters would scarcely think to consult.

His new exhibition, Telepathy, takes its title from communication beyond the known senses — an intriguing proposition for paintings assembled with such mathematical precision. Whether the viewer recognises his references is another matter. There is quite enough to occupy the eye without consulting a history of sacred geometry.

David Palliser — Unless it Happened Elsewhere

Jacob Hoerner Galleries, St Kilda, Melbourne | 12 November – 19 December 2026

David Palliser has spent much of his painting career inventing things that have no business existing. His peculiar shapes resemble bodily organs, machinery, cartoon creatures and occasionally something that might have escaped from a laboratory. They occupy paintings of considerable sophistication, although one suspects Palliser would be amused by anyone trying too earnestly to explain what they represent.

Palliser has been exhibiting since the early 1980s, and his peculiar inventions remain difficult to mistake for anybody else’s. His inclusion in the NGV’s Melbourne Now in 2013 brought them to a wider audience.

Palliser’s humour is evident even in his titles: Gelatin, Suds and Perpetual Capsules are among them. In Physics (2026), a pale pink figure with an elongated neck occupies the centre of a composition crowded with angular shapes and improbable objects. Brilliant yellow competes with deep green and black, while vivid orange defines the edges of the figure. Fine lines describe parts of its body, although the surrounding shapes are considerably harder to identify. Palliser is a gifted colourist, and there is considerable skill in the way he brings these apparently incompatible elements together.

His new exhibition, Yawning, follows Optional Symmetry at Jacob Hoerner Galleries in 2025. Experiment remains central to Palliser’s painting, with colour, invented forms and occasional excursions into the ridiculous providing him with plenty to investigate. There is no reason to expect him to settle into a routine now.

Graeme Altmann — Between Two Bays

Bayside Gallery, Brighton, Melbourne | 31 October to 13 December 2026

In Graeme Altmann’s recent landscapes, the volcanic country of western Victoria stretches beneath pale, overcast skies. Dark trees punctuate broad areas of reddish earth, while distant hills appear through the coastal haze. Altmann has little interest in making this country picturesque. The unusual arrangements of trees and open ground give his landscapes a character quite unlike the more conventional views of the Victorian coast. There is often as much to look at in the vegetation close at hand as in the country beyond it.

Altmann was born in Warrnambool and studied at Deakin University, then at Monash under Phillip Hunter, before attracting the attention of Sydney dealer Chandler Coventry. Alongside his painting, he has made sculptures and assemblages, including constructions involving boats and maritime subjects. He recently won the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize for Moonah Steps.

Between Two Bays refers to Lady Bay at Warrnambool and Port Phillip Bay, the two places that have supplied much of his subject matter. The rugged southwestern coastline, with its volcanic formations and powerful seas, differs considerably from the gentler country around Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. The exhibition brings paintings of both areas together, allowing us to compare his treatment of places with quite different physical characteristics.

Altmann has increasingly turned from expansive coastal views towards walking tracks and the peculiar vegetation of the coastal fringe. Moonahs occupy much of the view in several paintings, with pale water visible beyond them. He paints the trees broadly, describing their tangled growth without picking out every branch. Against the subdued colour, an occasional blue becomes surprisingly vivid. Elsewhere, warmer reds and oxides suggest the volcanic country of his childhood.

Naomi Bishop — Seven Levels of Invisibility

Kingston Arts Centre, Moorabbin, Melbourne | 6 November 2026 – 9 January 2027

In Dissolution (2026), pale blue and white circles emerge from a black ground, surrounded by smaller metallic forms and curious symbols. It resembles an astronomical chart, although there is an extraordinary sense of depth in a painting whose elaborate design might ordinarily suggest a flatter arrangement. The circular forms appear suspended in darkness, some advancing towards us while others seem almost impossibly distant. Naomi Bishop has achieved something rather unusual here, giving an intricate, semi-abstract composition the spatial depth of an immense, unexplored interior.

Bishop is a Melbourne artist whose interests include pagan ritual, unexplained phenomena and the uneasy relationship between science and mystical belief. Since completing a Master of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in London in 2003, she has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and galleries in Paris.

Seven Levels of Invisibility examines the seven stages of medieval alchemy through a series of large semi-abstract paintings and detailed works on paper. Bishop has drawn upon early manuscripts, obscure diagrams and the elaborate symbolism associated with the transformation of base metals into gold. The paintings progress through a sequence of colours, from blacks and greys to blues, greens and eventually a gilded sphere incorporating the colour wheel.

Alchemy has become one of the more tiresome cliches of contemporary art writing, invoked whenever a painter mixes a few pigments or experiments with materials. Kingston Arts duly declares that “painting becomes its own form of alchemical magic”. Ordinarily, I might have groaned, but on this occasion they can be forgiven. Bishop has a longstanding interest in the history of alchemy, its elaborate symbolism and the chemical experiments that occupied its practitioners. She gathers, grinds and combines pigments, investigating oxidation, dilution and the properties of different substances. For once, the language of alchemy seems entirely justified.

Bishop’s paintings are intricate, sometimes crowded, and certainly peculiar. There is a great deal to absorb in their elaborate symbolism, although I suspect the colour and inventiveness of the painting will prove more persuasive than any attempt to decipher every reference. She has chosen an unusual subject and pursued it with considerable dedication. I am particularly looking forward to seeing Seven Levels of Invisibility, including those pictures whose mysteries may remain unresolved.

Peter Tankey — Nightshift

Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne | Runs to 8 November 2026

A dog stands in the road, caught in headlight, in Peter Tankey’s Howitt St Headlight (Shadow), 2026. Behind it, graffiti covers a shop window lit blue-green from within. Most of the building disappears into darkness. The animal faces us, ears raised, its shadow thrown across the brickwork. The viewpoint puts us in the position of a driver who has stopped, or perhaps ought to.

Nightshift, at Brunswick Street Gallery, brings together oil paintings made over seven years, predominantly of Ballarat after dark. Tankey finds subjects on walks through the city. Some suggest a painting immediately; others require several passes. He alters what he observes, introducing animals into otherwise unoccupied scenes. We can recognise the kind of place without quite accounting for what is happening there.

Here, the dog’s pale coat catches the strongest light. Its carefully described body stands against the broad, dark road, while the graffiti forms a tangle across the window above. Tankey paints the competing sources of illumination particularly well. The headlights bleach the animal’s face and warm the bricks; the colder light behind the glass gives little indication of the room beyond.

There is something uncomfortable about looking at an animal that appears to be looking directly back. The dog is close enough for us to distinguish its expression, yet small against the building. Its exposed position in the road makes the headlight threatening. We cannot see their source, but Tankey has made us responsible for them.

Also Showing

• Peter Kennedy, Inhibodress Tapes; Khadim Ali, Unsafe Haven; and Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Girmit Kari — Milani Gallery, Woolloongabba QLD, Run to 7 November 2026.

• Pam Walpole & Adrienne Williams, Wild Geometry — CA Gallery, Sunshine Coast QLD, Runs to 10 November 2026.

• Justene Williams, Once We Were Mudskippers — Queensland Art Gallery, South Bank, Brisbane QLD, Runs to 7 March 2027.

• Leah Thiessen & Steve Waller, Explorations — Lone Goat Gallery, Byron Bay NSW, Runs to 21 November 2026.

• Michelle Cawthorn, Anni’s Birds; Julie Corbet, Forms That Flow; and Erin Murphy, Bananas in a Tree — Olsen Gallery, Sydney NSW, Run to 21 November 2026.

• Alexander McKenzie, Sally Ross and AJ Taylor, The Nature of Seeing; Ebony Russell, Fortuna — Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney NSW, Run to 21 November 2026.

• Tom Polo, and afterwards, a garden; Linda Marrinon, Yellow is for Candor —Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney NSW, Run to 21 November 2026

• Kevin Lincoln, The Night Sky — Niagara Galleries, Richmond VIC, 5 - 28 November 2026.

• Stephen Pleban, Another Green World —Gallerysmith, BAaD Gallery, Ballarat, 11 - 21 November 2026.

• Group Exhibition, It was a very quiet night in art heaven, in fact, a starry, starry night … — MARS Gallery, Melbourne, Runs to 21 November 2026.

Latest from This Art Life

John Peart: A Life in Painting

A review of John Peart, edited by Sioux Garside, its scholarship and the extraordinary range of Peart’s painting.

THIS ART LIFE I ANDREW MCILROY

Click on the image below to read the full review.

Best wishes,

Andrew

John Peart’s paintings changed so considerably throughout his career that even those familiar with his art may find surprises in the new monograph John Peart, edited by Sioux Garside (2026). Beautifully illustrated and exceptionally well researched, the book also reminds us that an artist’s reputation is no substitute for examining the paintings. The book brings together contributions by Sioux Garside, Anne Ryan, Quentin Sprague, Chris Saines CNZM and Virginia Milson, alongside Joe Frost’s 2011 interview with Peart.*

Occasionally, John Peart cut up his own paintings and assembled new ones from the pieces. He evidently had little sentimental attachment to what he had already painted. Anne Ryan examines this practice in her contribution to the new Peart monograph, supplying insights into his methods that no reproduction of a finished painting could provide.

The monograph was published by King Street Studios Pty Ltd in 2026 to accompany Unfolding Time, an exhibition at King Street Gallery on William in Sydney, with a further launch at Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne. Peart died in 2013, and Watters Gallery, which represented him for much of his career, has since closed.

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Peart had established his reputation remarkably early. At twenty-three, he was among the youngest artists included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s celebrated exhibition The Field in 1968. Awards, overseas travel and a distinguished exhibition history followed. Yet the geometric abstraction that first brought him recognition was only the beginning. In the years that followed, he produced paintings that frequently bore little resemblance to those made only a few years earlier.

That range gives the monograph much of its interest. The book was some six years in the making. It includes essays by Garside, Quentin Sprague and Ryan, a foreword by Chris Saines CNZM, personal recollections from Virginia Milson and Joe Frost’s 2011 interview with Peart. Its extensive illustrations bring together paintings from across Peart’s career, including examples rarely seen together.

What makes the scholarship particularly rewarding is the attention given to how Peart actually painted. Garside and Ryan examine his materials and methods, while Frost’s interview allows us to consider their findings alongside the artist’s own account. The paintings changed dramatically in appearance, but the book reveals more continuity in Peart’s working habits than those changes might suggest.

In her essay Unfolding Time, Garside examines Peart’s working practices, including his habit of reusing discarded materials. He described using square panels as palettes, putting them aside when the paint on them interested him and returning to them later. There is a world of difference between allowing paint to behave unpredictably and knowing what to do when it does.

Ryan examines Peart’s drawing, collage and printmaking, considering the part these played in the development of his painting. Rather than treating them as subsidiary activities, she examines their relationship to his paintings and the decisions involved in making them.

Peart’s experiments with collage are especially instructive. Once removed from its original arrangement, a painted fragment retains its colour, marks and physical character, but its relationship with everything surrounding it changes. By rearranging fragments, Peart could reconsider an entire composition without sacrificing individual passages of paint that interested him.

The procedure also tells us something about his understanding of composition. An attractive passage of painting was not necessarily worth preserving simply because it had been successfully executed. If its relationship with the rest of the picture proved unsatisfactory, Peart was apparently prepared to dismantle the lot.

Frost’s interview is particularly enjoyable in this context. Painters can become rather tiresome when explaining what their pictures mean, but Peart is considerably more informative when discussing what he actually did. His observations about deliberately introducing unfamiliar elements and beginning without a predetermined result suggest a painter perfectly willing to inconvenience himself.

Having achieved recognition unusually early, Peart might easily have spent the remainder of his career producing recognisable variations upon an established style. There were undoubtedly collectors who would have welcomed precisely that. Yet his distinction between a successful painting and one that conforms to accepted standards suggests he was more interested in what he might accomplish next.

Such intentions are easy enough to express. The paintings must supply the evidence, and the book contains an extraordinary variety of them.

Ravenna (1971), an enormous canvas dominated by yellow, black and magenta, has little in common with the disciplined geometry associated with Peart’s earliest success. Its broad expanses of colour suggest considerable freedom in the handling of paint, although the arrangement of its principal forms is anything but arbitrary.

Only a few years later, Grand Pink (1973) and Golden (1973–74) present more complicated arrangements of transparent washes and scattered marks. Their differences from Ravenna are considerable, yet the three paintings belong to a relatively brief period of Peart’s career. Garside examines their construction without attempting to make every change another chapter in a conventional history of stylistic development.

By 1985, Peart was producing paintings as elaborate as Neelima II, an enormous four-part composition measuring more than six metres across. It contains an intricate network of intersecting marks and colours. Individual passages vary in density and character, yet the composition is carefully organised across its immense dimensions. Across four panels, Peart has to sustain those relationships over more than six metres without allowing the painting to break into four separate pictures.

A decade later, Black to white (1995) employs an almost entirely restricted palette, with emphatic white lines crossing a black surface. The marks vary in thickness, direction and intensity. Their arrangement suggests an underlying structure, although the individual lines resist anything approaching mechanical regularity.

Drawing was hardly a subsidiary activity in Peart’s painting. The distinction between drawing and painting becomes considerably less useful when examining pictures in which marks are fundamental to the construction of the painted surface.

His later Thicketish paintings are different again. Their crowded surfaces contain overlapping colours and elaborate networks of lines, sometimes organised into smaller passages of quite different character. Despite their complexity, the individual elements remain part of a carefully considered composition.

Peart’s artistic interests extended well beyond Australia. Malevich, McCahon, Pollock and several other modernists figure in the essays, but it is his admiration for Ian Fairweather that I find particularly interesting. Peart recalled Fairweather as the first Australian painter whose art had genuinely moved him.

Their treatment of drawing and densely painted surfaces certainly invites comparison. In Fairweather’s paintings, drawing frequently provides the underlying structure even when partially obscured by successive applications of paint. Peart’s overlapping lines and colours suggest an artistic sympathy, although their paintings and circumstances were markedly different. Such comparisons are useful when they direct our attention towards particular pictures. An impressive collection of artistic influences explains very little in itself.

Music, meditation and spiritual experience also receive considerable scholarly treatment. These were genuine interests of Peart’s, although interpreting their influence upon individual paintings is a more demanding exercise. Abstract painting has attracted more than its share of musical analogies, and the familiar vocabulary of rhythm, harmony and repetition can become a substitute for examining how a picture is constructed.

Garside’s discussion of Black to white, for example, identifies something of the character of graffiti in its emphatic white marks. The comparison is immediately comprehensible, although the apparently casual lines belong to a carefully organised composition. I find such observations more informative than attempts to explain individual paintings principally through Peart’s intellectual interests. His interests deserve scholarly investigation, but their relationship to the paintings requires more than biographical evidence.

Quentin Sprague’s The Indirect Subject: John Peart in Place examines Peart’s relationship with Wedderburn, where he lived and painted for many years. His account of the artist’s windowless studio is a detail worth remembering when confronted by explanations of Australian abstraction that depend too heavily upon the surrounding landscape. An artist living among trees is not necessarily painting them.

Sprague also considers Peart’s interest in meditation and its relationship to the physical activity of painting in his discussion of Mantra Moment. Peart’s own observations provide valuable evidence, although precisely how meditation affected the paintings is less easily established.

Wedderburn was also home to a remarkable community of artists, including Elisabeth Cummings, Roy Jackson, Joan Brassil and Fred Braat. Their friendships and shared circumstances formed an important part of Peart’s life, although their individual practices differed sufficiently to discourage any convenient notion of a Wedderburn school. Sprague recognises the historical importance of these associations without confusing geographical proximity with artistic similarity.

One of the editorial merits of the publication is that these subjects can be examined without every contributor rehearsing the same biography. Garside and Ryan attend closely to Peart’s methods, Sprague considers place and the intellectual interests surrounding the work, while Frost allows Peart to describe his own practice. The personal recollections add another kind of evidence. There is occasional overlap, but scarcely enough to diminish the usefulness of the individual contributions.

Then there is the physical book, which is a pleasure in its own right. Peart’s paintings present formidable difficulties for reproduction, ranging from enormous canvases to delicate washes and intricate linear constructions. The illustrations have been given generous space, and the detailed photographic and production credits acknowledge the considerable effort involved.

Particularly impressive is the selection of paintings from different periods, including examples that might otherwise be unfamiliar even to readers who know Peart’s career. The reproductions accommodate enormous variations in colour and technique. A painting such as Neelima II inevitably loses much of its physical presence when reduced to book dimensions, but the reproduction allows us to examine its intricate construction and compare it with paintings produced decades earlier.

There remains an important place for the substantial artist monograph. Unlike an exhibition catalogue, it need not confine itself to the paintings assembled for a particular occasion. It can draw upon distant collections, incorporate research that would otherwise remain scattered and provide a visual account extending across an entire career. In Peart’s case, these advantages are particularly valuable. But elaborate production alone is no guarantee of scholarship. The finished book must justify the investment.

Following the closure of Watters Gallery, the Peart Estate is represented by King Street Gallery on William in Sydney and Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne. Both have substantial histories of supporting Australian painting. Their association with Peart is appropriate, and this publication demonstrates what commercial galleries can accomplish when their accumulated knowledge, access to collections and publishing resources are put to good use.

The danger with an artist monograph is that admiration becomes its organising principle. Everything the artist did is retrospectively justified, every influence becomes significant, and the most ordinary biographical circumstances acquire an importance they may never have possessed. The result may be beautifully illustrated and impeccably produced, but the scholarship can amount to little more than an elaborate endorsement.

The contributors have avoided that trap. Their research into Peart’s materials and methods is exceptionally thorough, while his intellectual and spiritual interests receive equally careful consideration. The illustrations are magnificent. The book considerably enlarges our understanding of Peart, but its greatest service is to send us back to the paintings. There is a great deal more to see than his established reputation might suggest.

John Peart. Edited by Sioux Garside. Sydney: King Street Studios, 2026. Hardcover, 268 pages, extensively illustrated. RRP A$80. Available from King Street Gallery on William.

*King Street Gallery on William supplied my review copy of the monograph. The opinions are entirely my own.

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Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

The Melbourne Cup remains a wealthy occasion, though its place in Melbourne life has changed considerably. Flemington’s paintings record the social distinctions, rituals and personalities that once made the racecourse a subject of consequence for Australian artists. They also give us something against which to assess the carnival today, when so much of its prestige appears to depend on expensive hospitality and trackside entertainment.

In 1887, the Austrian painter Carl Kahler completed an enormous painting of the lawn at Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day. There are no horses in sight. Men in frock coats and top hats accompany women wearing elaborate dresses, feathered hats and tightly fitted bodices. Among the gathering are colonial governors, businessmen, pastoralists and members of Melbourne’s fashionable society. The grandstand rises behind them, while the racecourse itself is largely concealed.

Kahler had arrived in Melbourne two years earlier, having trained in Munich, Paris and Italy. He quickly established himself as a portraitist, attracting commissions from some of the city’s wealthiest residents. The Lawn at Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day brought many of those people together in a single composition. A contemporary key identifies 73 individuals, including Sir Henry Brougham Loch, Governor of Victoria, and his counterparts from New South Wales and South Australia.

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The women’s pale dresses, ribbons and feathered hats stand out against the darker coats of the men. Kahler arranged his subjects in small groups, some conversing, others examining the company around them. He took considerable trouble with their faces, positioning the figures so that individual likenesses remained recognisable. The painting resembles a large society gathering whose participants have been given advance instructions about where to stand.

Kahler followed it with The Derby Day at Flemington and The Betting Ring at Flemington, completing an ambitious series devoted to Melbourne’s principal racing occasion. The paintings attracted considerable attention, and reproductions prepared by the Parisian firm Goupil circulated internationally. For Melbourne’s prosperous establishment, the pictures offered an opportunity to advertise its position in a colonial city enjoying extraordinary wealth.

Almost 140 years later, the three paintings remain in the collection of the Victoria Racing Club. Among the most elaborate artistic records of colonial Melbourne, they preserve the faces, fashions and social standing of people who have largely disappeared from public memory. The importance once attached to securing a place in Kahler’s compositions now seems rather extraordinary.

Horse racing began at Flemington when Melbourne was still a small colonial settlement beside the Yarra. The first Melbourne Cup was run in 1861, with Archer defeating sixteen rivals. Within two decades, the race was attracting crowds that sometimes approached a quarter of the city’s population. Melbourne had declared Cup Day a public holiday, and the annual journey to Flemington was already a familiar part of its social calendar.

The racecourse grew alongside the city. Wealth from the goldfields, pastoral properties and commerce financed imposing banks, public buildings and fashionable houses, while Flemington acquired grandstands, gardens and increasingly elaborate facilities for spectators. Its enclosures reflected the social divisions of Melbourne itself. The wealthy occupied the members’ lawns and grandstands, while bookmakers, working men and other spectators crowded into the betting rings and public areas. The race brought them together, although their enjoyment of the occasion depended considerably upon where they could afford to stand.

Kahler had a celebrated European example in William Powell Frith’s The Derby Day, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858. Frith depicted the crowds attending the English races at Epsom, filling his enormous composition with fashionable visitors, gamblers, entertainers, children and opportunists. The painting attracted extraordinary public interest, much of it directed towards the incidental dramas unfolding among the spectators. Its figures are engaged in their own activities, apparently unaware that they are being observed.

Kahler was more accommodating towards Melbourne’s fashionable establishment. His principal figures are carefully positioned, their clothes immaculate and their expressions generally composed. Frith’s people are busy with their own affairs; Kahler’s appear conscious of the painter’s attention. The difference is apparent in the compositions. Frith moves the eye through incidents distributed across the crowd, while Kahler repeatedly brings it back to individuals whose likenesses were intended to be recognised.

The Betting Ring at Flemington is the liveliest of Kahler’s three paintings. Dark coats and hats crowd the composition, interrupted by pale faces and occasional lighter garments. Bookmakers call the odds while spectators press forward to place their wagers. The scene has an excitement largely absent from the fashionable lawn, although Kahler remains attentive to the individual faces and carefully observed details of dress.

Where Frith captures the movement and variety of a crowd, Kahler gives particular attention to the people who made up Melbourne society. His paintings have something of the character of collective portraits, preserving an extraordinary record of the fashions, personalities and social customs surrounding the Melbourne Cup. Published accounts place all three paintings in the private Committee Room of the Victoria Racing Club at Flemington, largely hidden from public view.

While Kahler painted the people who gathered at Flemington, other artists found a considerable market among those who owned and bred the horses. Frederick Woodhouse senior and members of his family established a successful business painting thoroughbreds for owners and breeders. Working within the British tradition of sporting portraiture, they generally presented the horse in profile, its legs carefully positioned to display its proportions. A jockey or stable attendant might appear beside the animal, with a racecourse or pastoral property in the background.

These portraits celebrated horses whose breeding, training and racing achievements represented considerable financial investment. They also served as advertisements for successful bloodlines. Accuracy was important, and the Woodhouses paid particular attention to each animal’s musculature, coat and distinctive markings.

Carbine, winner of the Melbourne Cup in 1890, was among the most celebrated thoroughbreds of his generation. Carrying the extraordinary handicap of 10 stone 5 pounds, he defeated a field of 38 rivals and became famous well beyond Australia. His likeness was reproduced in paintings, prints and photographs, making him familiar even to people who had never attended a race meeting.

The Woodhouse portraits were often accomplished examples of animal painting, combining close observation with the conventions of British sporting art. Their familiar poses and settings suited their purpose, allowing attention to fall upon the horse’s physical qualities and the reputation it had acquired. Photography gradually assumed much of the work of recording celebrated thoroughbreds, although painted portraits continued to be commissioned as sporting commemorations.

By the middle of the twentieth century, artists were finding other subjects at Flemington. John Brack visited the racecourse every Saturday afternoon over six months in 1956, studying the jockeys, trainers and other people whose work occupied them there. He produced a series of watercolours and etchings, finding considerable interest in their faces, clothing and professional habits.

Brack had painted Collins St., 5 pm the previous year, with its procession of office workers making their way home through the city. At Flemington he found men whose occupations had shaped their physical appearance. The jockeys were slight, narrow-faced and dressed in brightly coloured silks, while the trainers wore ordinary working clothes. Their conversations and relationships supplied much of his material.

In The Conference, several figures gather in conversation, their positions suggesting an exchange in which each has a particular part. Brack’s drawing is economical, with angular bodies and faces described through closely controlled lines and washes of colour. He gives the men the slightly awkward appearance familiar from his other work of the period, without sacrificing their individual characteristics.

His etching Jockey and Trainer is even more concentrated. Two figures occupy a shallow space, their differences in build and clothing immediately apparent. Brack uses the contrast between them to suggest their professional relationship, allowing the figures to command the small composition without the assistance of a racecourse setting.

Brack’s interest recalls Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, who also found subjects among the jockeys, trainers and attendants associated with racing. There is a dry humour in his drawings, particularly in the contrast between the slight bodies and colourful clothes of the jockeys and the gravity with which they conduct their business. Brack observes their professional habits without making them caricatures.

Several of the drawings and etchings belong to the National Gallery of Victoria, while others remain in private collections. They are less familiar than Brack’s paintings of Melbourne streets and suburban life, although the racecourse provided him with an equally distinctive group of characters. Kahler had painted Flemington’s fashionable patrons; Brack was interested in the men whose work made the races possible.

Phar Lap’s victory in the 1930 Melbourne Cup made him a national hero during the Depression. His extraordinary achievements, followed by his sudden death in California, produced an outpouring of public affection. His mounted hide was returned to Melbourne, his heart preserved in Canberra and his skeleton sent to New Zealand. The division of his remains among three institutions is one of the stranger episodes in Australian sporting history.

John Kelly found an irresistible subject in the continuing devotion to Phar Lap. In The Ascension (1998), the horse’s mounted head and upper body protrude from a large transport crate bearing the Myer name. Suspended by straps against a stormy grey sky, the crate appears to be carrying Phar Lap heavenwards, a curious fate for an animal that had been dead for almost seventy years.

The painting refers to the return of Phar Lap’s preserved hide to Flemington in 1980, for the fiftieth anniversary of his Cup victory. Myer sponsored the occasion, and its name appears prominently on the crate. Kelly has turned the practical business of transporting a museum exhibit into an elaborate public ceremony. The horse looks remarkably composed as he rises from his packing case.

Kelly’s humour has an affectionate quality. Phar Lap had become an object of national devotion, his preserved remains treated with a reverence usually reserved for historical figures. The department store’s name introduces an incongruous commercial detail, while the suspended crate suggests a rather makeshift form of ascension. Kelly allows the absurdity of the occasion to speak for itself.

Ivan Durrant also developed a considerable interest in racing. His paintings of horses and racetracks employed photographic sources, unusual viewpoints and, in some later works, brilliant colour and softened forms. Their emphasis upon movement and the physical presence of horses differed from the composed animals of traditional sporting portraiture.

Durrant’s wider interest in animals was sometimes confronting. His notorious presentation of a dead cow at the NGV in 1975 challenged public attitudes towards the treatment of animals. His racing pictures were included in the NGV retrospective Ivan Durrant: Barrier Draw, demonstrating the place horses and the racetrack occupied within his work over several decades.

The Cup’s life on television has also supplied a subject for painting. In Makybe Diva Winning Her Third Melbourne Cup (2010), Shane Jones revisited the mare’s third victory in 2005 through an image complete with a pause symbol. That small detail places the viewer in front of a screen, watching a recording that can be stopped and replayed. Where Kahler painted the gathering at Flemington, Jones painted the race as it reached viewers at home.

Kahler’s three Flemington paintings remain in the collection of the Victoria Racing Club. Examples of the Woodhouse portraits belong to the State Library Victoria, the NGV and other public institutions. Brack’s drawings and etchings are dispersed through galleries and private collections, while Kelly’s The Ascension is held by Museums Victoria.

The paintings have survived, although their place in Australian art history is surprisingly modest. Kahler is remembered largely through his association with the fashionable society of colonial Melbourne, while the Woodhouse family is better known to racing historians than to students of Australian painting. Even Brack’s Flemington drawings receive comparatively little attention beside his celebrated pictures of Melbourne streets and suburban life.

Much of this can be traced to the way Australian art history has been written. The achievements of the Heidelberg School and the emergence of landscape painting as a means of expressing Australian identity have dominated accounts of the late nineteenth century. Portraitists, animal painters and artists working for wealthy private patrons have generally occupied a less prominent position. Their work has often been considered conventional, particularly when measured against the artistic developments associated with Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton.

The paintings have survived, although their place in Australian art history is surprisingly modest.

Kahler was an accomplished European-trained portraitist whose Flemington pictures satisfied the expectations of fashionable patrons. His methods were conservative, and he made few attempts to challenge the artistic conventions familiar to his clientele. The crowded compositions sometimes betray the difficulty of accommodating so many individual portraits, while the figures occasionally appear more concerned with their own appearance than with the activities surrounding them. These limitations are part of the paintings’ character, and there is little reason to disguise them.

The paintings also belonged to a substantial market for art that has received less attention than the familiar history of landscape painting. Melbourne’s wealthy residents commissioned portraits of themselves, their families, houses and horses. Pictures of public occasions were exhibited, purchased and reproduced, sometimes attracting considerable interest among people who were otherwise indifferent to artistic developments. Kahler’s success depended upon that clientele, whose patronage supported a flourishing trade in portraits and sporting subjects.

The original The Betting Ring at Flemington appeared in the NGV’s exhibition The Horse in 2015, although Kahler’s three paintings have seldom been examined together in accounts of Melbourne’s art. Preserved by the VRC, they remain better known within racing history than Australian painting.

Racing has attracted accomplished artists across generations. Kahler painted fashionable society, Brack studied the jockeys, and Kelly found humour in the preservation of Phar Lap. Shane Jones later painted the Melbourne Cup as a television image. These artists found subjects at Flemington beyond the racing itself, recording aspects of Melbourne society that rarely feature in conventional sporting pictures.

The Melbourne Cup will be run again on Tuesday, 3 November, attracting large crowds and international competitors. The race remains one of Australia’s great sporting occasions, although its former position in Melbourne society is less secure.

The old restrictions reflected the privileges of wealth and class, but selling access to formerly exclusive areas also changes the value of membership itself.

After several difficult financial years, the Victoria Racing Club has expanded membership and sought additional hospitality revenue. Guest arrangements and premium packages provide access to facilities traditionally associated with membership, reducing the distinction between belonging to the club and purchasing admission for an afternoon. The old restrictions reflected the privileges of wealth and class, but selling access to formerly exclusive areas also changes the value of membership itself.

Flemington has been repeatedly rebuilt, with successive generations replacing the grandstands and enclosures inherited from their predecessors. Much of the racecourse depicted in Kahler’s paintings has disappeared, although the lawns, roses, mature trees and sections of bluestone wall retain something of its earlier appearance. The Members’ Stand of 1924 survived for more than ninety years before being demolished to make way for the present Club Stand in 2018, with its extensive restaurants, bars and private entertaining rooms.

But prestige cannot be manufactured through expensive hospitality. The Melbourne Cup acquired its standing when racing occupied a much larger place in the city’s imagination. Attending Flemington was a social occasion of genuine consequence, and appearing among the fashionable company recorded by Kahler was itself a distinction. Melbourne has since found other amusements, while gambling and animal welfare have become increasingly contentious.

The carnival still generates an enormous quantity of photographs, television coverage and advertising. Fashion, celebrities and elaborate entertaining receive almost as much attention as the horses. Yet painting has largely disappeared from the public representation of the Melbourne Cup. Photography and television now provide the visual record once supplied by painters.

There is no shortage of subjects at Flemington. Horses, jockeys, trainers, bookmakers and spectators still provide a remarkable variety. The Melbourne Cup continues to attract extraordinary wealth, but little appears to be spent commissioning paintings of the occasion.

Most of the people in Kahler’s The Lawn at Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day are now anonymous without the printed key. Their elaborate clothes have become historical curiosities, and the society they represented has changed almost beyond recognition. Kahler gave those patrons the grand collective portrait they wanted. Their money secured their inclusion. It was the painter who gave them posterity.

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Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them

Peter Godwin’s paintings are delicious. Much of that pleasure comes from the paint itself, the richness of its application and the subtlety of the surfaces. His pale creams, greys and yellows possess a luscious quality, their variations of colour and texture difficult to reproduce in photographs. His drawing is assured, occasionally eccentric, and his arrangements of familiar objects can be wonderfully inventive. He knows his materials exceptionally well, and handles them with an apparent ease that adds to the enjoyment.

His exhibition Studio and Mountains, at Defiance Gallery from 24 October to 14 November 2026, includes interiors with Trobriand figures and a Highland shield, as well as mountain images placed among the studio furnishings. Broad, creamy expanses of light occupy some paintings; in others, dark curtains divide the room into tall, irregular shapes. The furnishings are familiar from one picture to the next, yet Godwin continually finds fresh uses for them.

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Godwin has spent years making exceptional paintings from modest subjects. His studio interiors on the New South Wales Central Coast contain furniture and curtains, with masks, ceramics, shields and shells keeping them company. He has discovered an astonishing variety of pictures among these familiar things. A change in the position of an object gives him new proportions to consider; a curtain supplies a broad passage of colour against which the furniture and smaller objects can be arranged.

The mountains in these studio pictures recall Godwin’s travels along the Li River in southern China, where the scenery is rather more imposing than the contents of his studio. Enormous peaks rise almost vertically from waterways and cultivated land, their outlines frequently obscured by mist. The scenery has attracted Chinese painters for centuries and now appears in innumerable tourist photographs. It would be difficult to find a landscape more obligingly picturesque.

Godwin visited China in 2013 with fellow artist Euan Macleod. Speaking to John McDonald two years later, he acknowledged that the Li River had become a cliche through its endless appearances in painting. He had initially considered painting Hong Kong Harbour, but found the subject insufficiently challenging. The limestone mountains of Guilin offered greater possibilities, along with a distinguished history of painting against which to consider his own work.

For his studio subjects, Godwin could draw on the example of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin. In The Silver Goblet (c.1728), a drinking vessel and a few other items occupy a tabletop. Small variations of tone give the goblet its substance and describe the reflections across its surface. Chardin could give a copper pot, a loaf of bread or an earthenware jug the presence traditionally associated with much grander subjects. He made extraordinary pictures from things available in almost any kitchen.

Godwin can establish a chair with a handful of lines or allow a ceramic figure to become part of a broad area of colour. Where Chardin carefully modelled his objects, Godwin often leaves their outlines visible through thin applications of paint. Both painters demonstrate how much can be made from familiar things. Godwin’s curtains offer him possibilities as rich as those Chardin discovered among his kitchen utensils.

Godwin’s curtains offer him possibilities as rich as those Chardin discovered among his kitchen utensils.

In Studio Interior with Masks and Trobriand Figures (2026), a mountain image occupies the lower right of an interior measuring 152.5 by 183 centimetres. Its peaks are lightly drawn within a rectangle, beside the small upright forms of the collected objects. Above them, a broad cream-coloured passage is bordered by warm brown and grey. Dark furniture stretches across the lower part of the painting, its curved edges giving the pale room an unexpected sweep.

The rounded summits introduce a different rhythm among the upright divisions of the room. Their fine outlines contrast with the small silhouettes on the furniture and the substantial darks below. A landscape that Godwin travelled thousands of kilometres to paint now has a place among his studio possessions, where its shapes can be considered beside those of a mask or a curtain.

Godwin can give a studio curtain as much space within a painting as a mountain occupies in a landscape. Its pale surface offers him broad areas of colour, interrupted by furniture and the outlines of smaller objects. Along the Li River, mist separates the limestone peaks and softens their contours.

Tai Mitsuji, interviewing Godwin for Artist Profile in 2022, discussed his determination to establish an individual approach to painting. Godwin spent many years teaching and experimenting before his first exhibition at Defiance Gallery in 2002, when he was approaching fifty. That long preparation gave him time to test his materials and reconsider the painters he admired.

Godwin’s interiors were well developed before his first visit to China. His earlier paintings were often dark and substantially worked, with objects emerging from successive applications of paint. John McDonald has described Godwin’s early interest in Frank Auerbach and his subsequent reconsideration of painters including Bonnard, Braque and Chardin. Tempera became increasingly important as he experimented with his materials and developed his own methods.

Godwin told McDonald that he had experimented with egg tempera while “working my way through Ian Fairweather”. In Fairweather’s paintings, a line might describe part of a figure, then continue across the surrounding space, acquiring a rhythm of its own. There is something of this in Godwin’s graphite, which passes through objects and the spaces around them. He also named Bonnard, whose domestic interiors offered another example: the colour of a wall or table could be adjusted repeatedly as the painting developed. That willingness to try adventurous colour relationships among familiar furnishings is evident in Godwin’s interiors, even within his much narrower range of creams and greys.

Godwin initially worked with egg tempera in a comparatively substantial manner, before developing the thinner surfaces of his recent paintings. Tempera emulsion, sometimes combined with oil and graphite, allows him to build delicate variations of colour while retaining much of the drawing. The new works use tempera emulsion and graphite on linen or board. He adds and removes paint, exposing earlier layers and varying the opacity of the surface. A cream or grey can acquire considerable richness through these slight differences.

Luscious paint is often associated with thick applications of oil, the loaded brush or the palette knife. Godwin demonstrates how sensuous a relatively thin surface can be. Successive applications alter the warmth or translucency of a pale passage, sometimes leaving the texture of the support visible beneath it. There is a particular pleasure in following these variations across what first appears to be a simple area of colour.

The pale colours reflect the filtered light of the studio, where, as Lucy Stranger described in her text for the 2025 exhibition Notes to Oneself, large sheets of fabric hang across the windows to soften the strong sunlight. The exhibition catalogue also describes the warm, golden light these coverings produce. As the daylight changes, the furniture and objects become more or less distinct. Their outlines soften, and their colours become part of the diffused illumination of the room.

Pale colours are particularly sensitive to their neighbours. A warm grey may make an adjacent cream appear cooler, while a carefully placed dark can alter the apparent brightness of an entire passage. Godwin manages these relationships with remarkable precision. His large pale areas contain beautiful variations of warmth and opacity, through which the room’s furnishings take shape.

In Studio Mountain Study, Grey Curtain (2026), tall dark passages divide the room, with broad grey strokes describing the hanging fabric. Warm, pale colour fills the intervals between them. A chair curves into the lower foreground, while the mountain study is drawn with much finer lines near the centre. The contrast between these delicate outlines and the full brushstrokes of the curtains is especially enjoyable. The eye moves from the weight of the painted fabric to the lightly drawn peaks, finding quite different kinds of handling within a small area.

Godwin’s graphite has a character of its own. Lines extend beyond the objects they describe or cross a painted passage, their direction contributing to the composition as much as to the recognition of a particular furnishing. Some edges are firmly drawn; elsewhere, a change of colour supplies all the definition an object needs. He can leave a form lightly drawn and work the surrounding colour more freely.

In his 2015 interview with McDonald, Godwin praised Matisse and discussed how decoration could determine the arrangement of a painting. In The Red Studio (1911), red covers almost the entire room. Much of the furniture is established through outlines, while the paintings within the painting retain their own colours. A table remains recognisable through a few pale lines; a small picture supplies a concentrated patch of colour against the surrounding red. The proportions of these objects and the spaces between them give the room its extraordinary coherence.

Patterned fabrics in Godwin’s own interiors have sometimes acknowledged Matisse directly. He generally employs a more subdued palette, but gives the pattern on a curtain considerable influence over the surrounding room. A few coloured shapes along its edge can enliven a much larger area of pale paint.

The new paintings include Trobriand figures, a Highland shield and a Timor Leste spirit figure, each with a distinctive outline or surface. Godwin handles them with evident affection. A small figure is recognisable by its outline, even where its colour merges with the furniture or fabric behind it.

There is humour in some of these combinations. An imposing ceremonial object may share a table with something quite ordinary, while an elaborate mask finds itself beside a domestic curtain. Godwin seems to enjoy the improbable company his collections keep.

The limestone peaks of the Li River supply another assortment of unusual shapes, on a vastly larger scale. Godwin gives their peaks differing degrees of emphasis, defining some with a strong outline and allowing others to become pale shapes within the mist. The spaces between them are beautifully varied. An expanse of water separates one group of cliffs from another; a narrow interval allows a more distant peak to appear.

His Li River Landscape (pale peak and mist) (2026), winner of the inaugural $100,000 Australia China Art Residency Art Prize, measures 183.5 centimetres square. Painted in tempera emulsion and oil on linen, it presents the limestone cliffs rising above a broad river, their forms partly obscured by mist. Their characteristic outlines give Godwin a succession of steep ascents and rounded summits to arrange across the painting.

The river occupies a substantial area. Passages of blue, grey and green vary across its surface, with related colours appearing among the cliffs. Some mountain forms are sharply defined, while others become partly absorbed into the surrounding atmosphere. Broad pale spaces separate the more substantial peaks, with distant formations appearing through the gaps.

The paint is especially satisfying where a thin blue or grey meets a warmer passage, or where a dark peak rises against the mist. These changes give the mountains their substance and distinguish the distances between them. The surface has the subtle richness of his studio interiors, with far greater expanses of water and air to accommodate.

In the new exhibition’s Li River Mountains, Blue, the peaks take on a more freely drawn character. Blue-grey strokes curve upwards across a creamy ground, sometimes enclosing a pale summit, sometimes widening into a translucent band. The tallest peak leans across the composition, with smaller arches gathered around its base. Warm grey and brown border the mountain forms, giving their cool colour a particular freshness. The pleasure lies as much in the movement and varying density of these strokes as in the recognition of the limestone formations.

The mist and open spaces in Godwin’s landscapes have precedents in Chinese scroll painting. Mountains emerge from mist or cloud in traditional scroll paintings, while waterways separate groups of rocks and trees. A long handscroll can combine several viewpoints, allowing the painter to describe a succession of places across considerable distances. The unpainted areas can give those distances much of their scale.

Godwin uses tempera and oil to vary the opacity of a mountain or distinguish it from the surrounding mist through a slight change of colour. In his large carborundum print Black Mountain (2022), dark masses and strong contrasts make the formations imposing, while the medium gives the black a wonderfully substantial texture.

In Studio Mountains and Moon (2026), a small vertical painting measuring 41 by 30.5 centimetres, the mountain image stands beside the curved back of a chair. Its peaks are described in fine, looping lines beneath a pale disc of moon. Brown and grey verticals rise around it, with dark furniture crossing the lower part of the picture. The thin paint allows the weave of the linen to contribute to the surface, giving even the palest passages a beautifully tangible texture.

The mountain outlines accompany the chair’s curved wood and the upright divisions of the room. The small moon is pale against the warmer colours. Godwin’s travels have given him something he can continue to paint at home, considering the shapes of distant peaks alongside objects he sees every day.

Godwin’s pale interiors, with their improbable collections of objects and wonderfully delicate surfaces, are among the most beautiful pictures being made in Australia. The Chinese landscapes share the richness of their thin paint and the assurance of their drawing. In Studio and Mountains, the two subjects are brought together, sometimes within a single painting, as Godwin considers the outlines of distant peaks beside his familiar furnishings. His feeling for colour and proportion is as exact in a small studio picture as in a broad river landscape. With both, the paint is indeed delicious.

Author’s note: Written to coincide with Studio and Mountains at Defiance Gallery, this essay is a broader consideration of Godwin’s painting rather than a conventional exhibition review.

Peter Godwin: Studio and Mountains, Defiance Gallery, 12 Mary Place, Paddington, Sydney, 24 October – 14 November 2026. Contact the gallery for a copy of the exhibition catalogue.

Shown alongside Lea Ferris: Polymorphae Incognita.

References

John McDonald, “Stepping Out”, Artist Profile, Issue 32 (2015); republished as “Peter Godwin” on johnmcdonald.net.au, 12 September 2015.

Tai Mitsuji, “Peter Godwin”, Artist Profile, Issue 60 (2022).

Lucy Stranger, “Notes to Oneself”, Defiance Gallery (2025).

Defiance Gallery, “Peter Godwin: Studio and Mountains”, exhibition catalogue, 24 October – 14 November 2026.

Andrew McIlroy, “Between River and Field: Landscape-Making in the Work of Peter Godwin and John Wolseley”, This Art Life, 23 April 2026.

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Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

In Spilt milk (c.1903), Margaret Preston sets an overturned jug beside an egg upright in its cup. Milk pools across the brown table, its irregular outline interrupting the rounded forms of the crockery. A spoon lies diagonally between the spill and a shallow dish, while small blue flowers on ceramic wall tiles pattern the background. The jug’s looped handle projects towards us, above the milk spreading towards the picture’s edge.

The painting is included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Margaret Preston, her first retrospective in more than twenty years. Bringing together over 200 works, the exhibition runs until 31 January 2027. Spilt milk predates her first European journey in 1904 and her published campaign for a distinctly Australian art by roughly two decades. Her reputation rests heavily on that campaign and her paintings of native flowers. In Spilt milk, she was already solving problems of colour and composition that had little to do with defining Australia.

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At Melbourne’s National Gallery School, Preston studied under Frederick McCubbin from 1893 and returned in 1896 to study painting under Bernard Hall. She learned to model forms through tonal gradations, working from darks towards the light. In Spilt milk, the opening of the overturned jug recedes into shadow; its pale body turns gradually towards the light. A small highlight catches the egg’s shell. Within the shallow space, changes of tone give the objects volume and distinguish their surfaces.

The spilled milk carries the jug’s pale colour beyond its rounded body and across the brown table. Its irregular outline gives Preston a less predictable arrangement than the crockery alone would supply. The spill also introduces a domestic mishap, leaving us to imagine how the jug was overturned.

The polished silver of The tea urn (c.1909) reflects patches of pink and grey that complicate its rounded body. Its ornate legs rise behind a plate bearing two lemon halves, while a loose curl of peel lies near the table’s edge. The peel gives the foreground an irregular shape to set against the ordered crockery, much as the spreading milk does in Spilt milk. In her later still lifes, she would take greater liberties with the objects themselves and the spaces around them.

In Implement blue (1927), three white cups sit above shadows so solid they could almost be cut out and lifted from the table. Behind them stand a glass with lemon, a sugar bowl and a reflective jug. Black outlines separate the objects; broad white bands cross the dark upper background. Reflections break the jug’s surface into smaller patches of colour.

The milk in the earlier painting spreads along the table; the blue shadows in the later one behave almost like additional utensils placed upon it. Each extends a pale cup into a much larger dark shape. Their saturated colour makes them conspicuous in their own right. Behind them, the black-and-white bands divide the background as sharply as the outlines divide the tableware. The spaces around the objects have acquired shapes as definite as those of the cups and jug.

An account centred on Preston’s nationalism risks making these household subjects preliminary to her native flowers. Yet her interest in ordinary objects continued through a considerable change of method. The tonal modelling of Spilt milk gives way to the emphatic boundaries and divisions of colour in Implement blue. The later picture is the more inventive construction. Its subject gave Preston scope to develop ideas that required no specifically Australian imagery.

Preston understood the usefulness of such concentrated work. In her 1929 aphorisms she compared still-life tables to “laboratory tables”, places where aesthetic problems could be isolated. She could select the objects, alter their spacing and simplify the setting. In 1931 she described paper studies scattered through the house and a composition decided before she assembled its contents. Her Japanese books contain marginal sketches adapting printed designs to proposed compositions. These preparations show how much planning could precede an apparently straightforward arrangement.

In Western Australian gum blossom (1928), the plant supplies a more awkward set of forms. A tall column of grey-green leaves rises above three bright blossoms with pink-red rims and yellow centres. The leaves overlap like an irregular stack of plates, while stems descend into a dark glass vase. Cream rectangles bordered by black divide the background. A fallen pale form sits near the lower right, apart from the upright growth.

The three blossoms interrupt the column of leaves with rounded forms and concentrated colour. Pointed ends and abrupt changes of direction prevent the foliage from settling into a regular pattern. The plant’s peculiar growth complicates the geometry Preston has established behind it. The fallen form extends the composition sideways, offsetting the upward movement of the stems.

Her preference for Australian plants helped her find these forms. She preserved their irregularities within a setting whose pale background and dark divisions carry forward discoveries made with household objects in Implement blue. Her national convictions had a practical value here: they directed her towards a subject that extended her painting. That success gives her no exclusive formula for what Australian artists should paint or how they should work.

Her public standing during these years was considerable. Sydney Ure Smith reproduced her pictures and published her opinions in Art in Australia and The Home, and three of his publications were devoted exclusively to her. She exhibited jointly with Thea Proctor in 1925, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales invited her to paint a self-portrait in 1929, the first such invitation to an Australian woman artist. Any account of the obstacles faced by women artists must also accommodate the authority Preston achieved.

Her woodcuts could be sold in editions and reproduced in magazines, putting the compositions before people who might seldom visit a gallery. She recommended ownership as a form of education: “The easiest way to understand modern art is to buy an example and live with it.” She could address prospective buyers through publications that regularly reproduced her work.

By 1938 she was producing floral paintings for international display. Six went to the Australian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and four, including Flannel flowers, to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Plants from her Berowra garden and its surroundings had become subjects through which Australia represented itself abroad.

Flannel flowers is over a metre high. Pale, pointed blooms spread widely above a substantial brown pot; long leaves divide the dark background, and red-orange bells interrupt the greys and greens. The arrangement extends well beyond its container. Preston gives the pot enough breadth and solidity to support the spreading foliage above.

The repeated pale blooms distribute attention across the upper half, while the broad pot concentrates weight below. That division gives the painting a clear structure, though a more predictable one than Western Australian gum blossom, where the flowers interrupt the leaves at distinct points and the foliage changes direction abruptly. The larger arrangement offers fewer such disruptions. Its Australian subject and official standing provide no reason to overlook that difference.

Coastal gums (1929) packs a profusion of flowers into a smaller picture without distributing the emphasis so evenly. Orange-red blossoms crowd above a dark pot, their rounded clusters interrupted by pointed leaves, while the mirrored tray sets hard diagonals beneath them.

For the 1939 World’s Fair, Australia’s New York pavilion placed Preston’s work within a modern interior designed by John Oldham and Douglas Annand, using photomontage and illuminated displays. Her six paintings were installed in a continuous frame along the mezzanine. Their presentation drew extensively on international architectural and graphic ideas, even as the flowers served a national purpose.

Preston’s published prescription for Australian art went further than painting native flowers. In “The Indigenous Art of Australia”, published in 1925, she declared that “it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring”. She was referring to Aboriginal people. The word “only” made Aboriginal art the prescribed source of an Australian art. She also presumed that designs belonging to particular peoples and traditions were available for the national purpose she proposed. (Ann Stephen)

In 1930, Preston told decorators not to bother about “what the carver meant in the way of myths, rites”, declaring this “not the decorators’ affair”. The advice encouraged the use of Aboriginal designs without understanding their purposes. The NGV identifies the source of her 1927 Aboriginal design – Design from Pikan shield as a rainforest shield from the Russell River region of Far North Queensland. Its design has cassowary associations significant to Mamu people; bullet holes mark its surface. Copying its pattern detached the design from the meanings and history of the object that carried it. (NGV 2026)

The quality of an adaptation cannot validate that advice. Nor can the advice establish the faults of every picture she made. A design traced to a particular shield can be examined against its source; an angular leaf or an earth colour requires other evidence before it can be described as another such borrowing. Preston’s claims were sweeping enough. Criticism of her work should be more exact.

Preston herself reconsidered the terms of cultural exchange. In “The orientation of art in the post-war Pacific” in 1942, she advocated exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and urged Australians to exchange ideas with Asian neighbours. This was a more reciprocal proposal than her earlier advice to decorators, although it did not resolve the questions raised by her use of particular designs.

In Flying over the Shoalhaven River (1942), the pale river cuts through browns, greys and ochres. Small touches suggest vegetation, while low clouds and their shadows interrupt the larger divisions of the terrain. Preston’s experience as a passenger gave her a view in which the river’s course could be seen across a broad expanse of country.

The river gives direction to the composition, but cloud shadows complicate the pattern of the land beneath it. Broad areas of colour establish the terrain; scattered touches prevent those areas from becoming uniform. Preston controls how much detail each passage receives, allowing the river to remain legible through changes of colour and texture. The aerial view gave her a new subject for the selective description she had practised in still life.

She continued altering her methods. In the 1940s the rough side of Masonite offered a coarser printing surface than her earlier woodblocks. She cut into the board and applied colour directly to its raised areas. The resulting texture suited her treatment of the bush and broke with the crisp definition of her earlier prints. Her interest in the country prompted her to try a surface that disrupted an established feature of her work.

This was a substantial change for an artist whose prints had depended on sharply bounded shapes. The rougher surface made texture part of the description, allowing broken areas of colour to suggest vegetation without defining every leaf or branch. Her Australian subjects encouraged the experiment, but its success depended on how she used the board and distributed the colour. The retrospective gives us the opportunity to examine those decisions across successive works, rather than treating each new method as further evidence of her national convictions.

Preston’s national convictions helped her find subjects and encouraged technical experiments. Yet Spilt milk and Implement blue show how much she could discover through household objects with no particular Australian identity. Native flowers gave her further opportunities; their success did not establish what other Australian artists should paint.

Her dismissal of Aboriginal meanings remains a failure of understanding, even where her adaptations succeeded as designs. Neither that failure nor her advocacy of Australian subjects supplies a verdict on everything she painted. The NGV deserves credit for bringing together the range of work needed to test her claims against her practice. Australian plants supplied forms she used with considerable invention. They give us no reason to accept her insistence that Aboriginal art must provide the foundation for an Australian art.

Margaret Preston, The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne, Runs until 31 January 2027

Sources

• Smith & Singer, Spilt milk, Important Australian Art, 25 August 2015.

• Isobel Seivl, ‘Margaret Rose Preston’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1988.

• Ann Stephen, ‘Designing for the world of tomorrow: Australia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair’, reCollections, National Museum of Australia, vol. 1, no. 1.

• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Margaret Preston: Art and Life, 2005, including ‘The craft of art: 1901–1911’.

• Roger Butler, Margaret Preston: Australian Printmaker, National Gallery of Australia, 2004–05.

• National Gallery of Australia, The Prints of Margaret Preston; Australian Decorative Arts 1900–1985; collection commentary on Flying over the Shoalhaven River.

• Rose Peel, ‘Margaret Preston: A material girl explained’, AICCM Symposium, 2006, pp. 18–35.

• National Gallery of Victoria, Margaret Preston, exhibition chronology, labels and media release, 2026.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

William Bradley’s watercolour of the capture of Bennelong and Colebee is an important picture without being a particularly good one. The small figures are stiff, their actions difficult to distinguish. Bradley is more assured with the trees and shoreline than with the people. Without its inscription, Taking of Colbee & Benalon, 25 November 1789, we might struggle to identify the episode. Its maker had no such uncertainty. He had given the signal to seize the men.

The watercolour is held by the State Library of New South Wales with Bradley’s journal, A Voyage to New South Wales. First lieutenant aboard Sirius, he helped survey Sydney Harbour, where Bradleys Head bears his name. Drawing belonged to his professional duties: the description of coasts and anchorages required accuracy, and his views preserve valuable information about the harbour’s shores. This picture also documents an abduction he carried out on Governor Arthur Phillip’s orders. His authority as a witness comes with responsibility for what he witnessed.

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Reading Rob Mundle’s The First Fleet sent me back to these pictures, paying closer attention to the boats. In Bradley’s account, the boat’s position was essential to the capture. He had it turned and backed towards the beach, with four crewmen remaining aboard. The stern was close enough to receive the prisoners while the bow faced open water. The crew could pull away before the men’s companions reached them. What looks like a minor incident in a harbour view depended on careful preparations, made by the officer who later drew it.

Australian galleries increasingly exhibit historical pictures like this alongside contemporary works, sometimes commissioning artists to respond to the past through questions of race, gender and identity. Such exhibitions can produce excellent results, particularly when an artist brings an established practice and a genuine interest in the material. But the contemporary response can also become the principal attraction, with the historical picture reduced to an example of the attitudes the exhibition intends to challenge. A commission may advertise the institution’s willingness to reconsider its collection, while telling us remarkably little about the particular work that prompted it.

At the Art Gallery of Ballarat, this approach became a recurring feature of the exhibition programme. Call and Response (2022) paired historical and contemporary works from the collection. Beating About the Bush (2022–23) brought Australian Impressionist paintings together with contemporary photography by women. Upheaval on the Goldfields (2023) placed older and newer depictions of Ballarat’s history alongside one another. The subjects varied, although the repeated use of the same device makes the promise of fresh interpretation less persuasive.

The stated purpose of Beating About the Bush exposed the presumption behind the exercise. Director and curator Louise Tegart described contemporary photographers as supplying what the Impressionists had omitted, “allowing contemporary female photographers to put these elements back in the picture”. They would, she said, tell “a more comprehensive story”. That wording presents the omissions of historical paintings as shortcomings for contemporary artists to remedy. That is a poor basis for examining a painting. No individual picture can provide a comprehensive account of the society that produced it, and treating its omissions as faults allows the curator’s preferred subjects to become the measure of the artist’s achievement.

The institution thereby presents its contemporary priorities as an advance on those represented in the older paintings. The older paintings become evidence of attitudes the exhibition presents as superseded. Repeated across an exhibition programme, the device becomes intellectually lazy: works made under quite different circumstances are recruited to support the same account of contemporary progress. Bradley’s watercolour exposes the shortcomings of that formula. His journal describes his part in an abduction he himself found deeply troubling, and the painting allows us to examine how he represented it. Substituting a contemporary response for examination of that evidence would be a failure of interpretation.

Joan Ross’s exhibition Those trees came back to me in my dreams, at the National Portrait Gallery in 2024–25, provides a more convincing reason for bringing historical and contemporary works together. Working with curators Coby Edgar and Emma Kindred, Ross selected historical portraits to accompany her own work. She had been drawing upon colonial imagery for years, and her interventions depended upon a close familiarity with the pictures she appropriated. The original portraits remained available for examination alongside her contemporary interpretations.

In M’lady Ikebana (2015), Gainsborough’s Mrs Graham wears fluorescent yellow and arranges eucalypts taken from John Glover’s Natives on the Ouse River, Van Diemen’s Land (1838). Small Aboriginal figures become part of her display. Flower arranging becomes an absurd exercise of ownership: trees and people are available for a cultivated woman’s pleasure. Ross exploits the disproportion between the commanding portrait figure and the country reduced to her arrangement. The woman continues her genteel occupation, apparently oblivious to what she is handling.

Gainsborough supplies the figure and the social authority of her pose; Glover supplies the trees and Aboriginal figures she rearranges. Their respective contributions give the satire its precision. Ross’s fluorescent yellow makes her alteration conspicuous. Her argument depends on what she does to these particular images, and we can assess whether the result justifies the borrowing.

The difficulty comes when an institution adopts the contemporary artist’s criticism as sufficient explanation of the historical work. The older picture may be assigned the colonial attitudes the exhibition intends to expose, while its contemporary companion is presented as the correction. Such an arrangement can flatter the institution: past errors are acknowledged, present enlightenment demonstrated. Yet the historical picture may receive little examination beyond its assigned role. Ross’s achievement lies in her particular use of Gainsborough and Glover. It gives museums no reason to treat the pictures they hold merely as material awaiting correction.

A gallery explaining a historical painting assumes a different responsibility. In its published account of Belonging: Stories of Australian Art, the National Gallery of Australia discussed Arthur Streeton’s Golden summer, Eaglemont (1889) alongside paintings made by senior Aboriginal men at Papunya in the 1970s. The account acknowledged Streeton’s evocation of sun and heat, while identifying the pastoral landscape as Wurundjeri country transformed by dispossession and clearing. It then attributed the loss of native grasses to overstocking and concluded: “The beautiful yellow pasture seen in the painting becomes a sign of colonisation.”

That history belongs in a discussion of Golden summer. The difficulty lies in treating the effects of pastoral settlement as an explanation of the particular field Streeton painted. Yellow grass cannot by itself demonstrate overstocking or erosion. The gallery’s published account supplies no evidence of the grazing history at Eaglemont sufficient to establish that connection. The yellow pasture may be consistent with the environmental changes the gallery describes, but Streeton’s painting alone cannot establish their cause.

This questions a particular explanation, rather than condemning Belonging or its association of Streeton with Papunya painting. Bringing those works together allows their contrasting representations of country to be examined. It does not relieve the institution of explaining the evidence behind its claims. Ross visibly alters her sources to make an argument of her own. The gallery asks us to accept an argument about Streeton’s painting and the land it depicts.

Bradley’s journal allows us to examine the watercolour against his own account of the capture. He describes the boat’s position and the distress barely discernible among the painted figures. The officer who organised the seizure also recorded how much he disliked carrying it out.

Phillip wanted Aboriginal people to live among the British, learn English and assist communication. His first impressions of the men at Manly had been favourable. In January 1788 they had waded out unarmed to meet his boats, displaying the confidence that prompted the British name for the cove. They generally avoided the settlement, however. Phillip came to believe that taking someone captive, then treating him well, would establish the friendship his invitations had failed to secure.

Arabanoo was captured at Manly in December 1788. Before learning his name, the British called him “Manly”, after the cove from which they had taken him. They washed and clothed him and appointed a keeper to prevent his escape. Their accounts gave considerable attention to his food, comfort and treatment, as though these provisions could reconcile him to being detained.

Tench’s account of an outing aboard Supply suggests how little they had reconciled him. Arabanoo jumped into the harbour and swam towards shore, trying to dive beneath the water. His clothes kept him buoyant. A boat pursued him and brought him back, resisting. The British garments that would distinguish a sitter in a portrait had become an impediment to escape.

Arabanoo died during the epidemic that devastated Aboriginal communities around the harbour in 1789. In November, Phillip ordered another capture. Bradley’s party obtained fish on the journey and used them to entice Bennelong and Colebee within reach. The men left their spears among the rocks. British and Aboriginal men were dancing together when Bradley gave his signal.

Both captives were passed into the waiting boat. Their companions advanced with weapons, but the crew pulled away before they could reach it. Bradley recorded that the boat had remained afloat and that his party escaped without firing a musket. His preparations had allowed the British to take the men while avoiding a fight with those attempting to help them.

In the watercolour, the boat occupies the stretch of water between people advancing from the trees and others gathered on the rocks. Bradley’s account gives that expanse a practical significance: the companions on shore could see the prisoners being carried away but could no longer reach them.

His journal records the cries of women and children, the captives’ terror and their anguish at separation from their friends. He described the assignment as “by far the most unpleasant service I ever was order’d to Execute”. Assurances of good treatment could not reconcile the men to their situation. Bradley preserved their distress in greater detail than he could convey through the painted figures.

The State Library describes the surviving journal as apparently a fair copy compiled after 1802. The date beneath the watercolour identifies the capture without establishing when Bradley painted it. The border and inscription give the sheet the finish of an illustrated account prepared for later inspection. That presentation lends the episode an order sharply at odds with the anguish described in the journal. Both belong to Bradley’s account of his service.

Colebee escaped within weeks. Bennelong remained until May 1790, when, according to Tench, he claimed illness during the night, persuaded the servant supervising him to let him downstairs and jumped a paling fence. By then he had learned English and become familiar with Phillip’s household. In July the governor wrote to Joseph Banks that “nothing will make these people amends for the loss of their liberty”.

Phillip had apparently mistaken Bennelong’s familiarity with his household for acceptance of captivity. Bennelong could enjoy the governor’s hospitality and learn the language of his captors while continuing to look for an opportunity to leave. Phillip’s letter to Banks acknowledged what Bradley had already described at the moment of capture: the injury of losing one’s liberty.

Their next meeting at Manly began with news brought by boat. On 7 September 1790, a British party approached a large gathering around a dead whale. Bennelong and Colebee came forward, and Bennelong asked for Phillip. The invitation reached the governor as he returned from South Head. He collected firearms before crossing to Manly with David Collins and Henry Waterhouse. Although he approached without a gun in his hands, weapons were available in the boat.

There were requests for hatchets and an exchange of provisions. Bennelong drank wine and gave the royal toast he had learned in the settlement. Phillip admired a spear. Another man, Willemering, approached carrying one. The governor advanced towards him and threw down his dirk, a gesture Tench interpreted as an attempt to dispel fear. Willemering’s spear entered Phillip’s shoulder.

Two watercolours attributed to the unidentified Port Jackson Painter depict the aftermath. One is inscribed The Governor making the best of his way to the Boat after being wounded with the spear sticking in his Shoulder. The other identifies Waterhouse attempting to break the spear. Both belong to the Watling Collection at London’s Natural History Museum. We do not know whether their maker witnessed the incident.

The first inscription has an almost conversational plainness, although “making the best of his way” understates the difficulty. The long shaft struck the ground as Phillip tried to retreat, pulling at the wound. Its barb prevented Waterhouse from safely withdrawing it. He had to break the shaft before the governor could be moved into the boat. The second picture gives that awkward task a subject of its own.

Men brought muskets ashore, but Tench says only one would fire. Other accounts differ over details of the retreat. The weapons collected before the crossing had offered uncertain protection. Bradley had kept his boat afloat and ready to withdraw with the captives; Phillip’s party struggled to get its wounded governor across the beach.

The pictures depend on their inscriptions to identify these small actions within broad views of the shore. An episode easily abbreviated to “the spearing of the governor” becomes a protracted and painful removal.

Whether the spearing was arranged punishment remains disputed. Several historians have interpreted it as an exercise of Aboriginal law, requiring Phillip to answer for the captures or other British conduct. Fear of another seizure is also plausible. Bennelong’s invitation is documented; a plan to lure the governor into punishment remains an interpretation. The British writers likewise supplied motives they could not know with certainty. The watercolours offer no means of settling the dispute, however definite their descriptions of the aftermath.

Phillip refused to retaliate and attributed the attack to apprehension about capture. Relations resumed, with Bennelong and others visiting the settlement and leaving again. His response deserves its place beside the earlier orders. He could acknowledge the grounds for Aboriginal fear after suffering its consequences himself.

The inscriptions on Bennelong’s portraits also influence how we read them. The Port Jackson Painter’s likeness is inscribed as showing him angry after Colebee was wounded. The words attach the face to a particular episode and encourage us to interpret its expression accordingly. We cannot recover the circumstances from the face alone. The inscription makes its own claims about what the artist saw and understood.

The small portrait associated with Bennelong’s London visit, generally dated circa 1793 and now held by the State Library of New South Wales, shows him in profile, wearing a cravat and spotted waistcoat. Later engravings surround the dressed figure with Aboriginal weapons and other objects. His clothes conform to British conventions of respectable appearance, while the surrounding display insists on his foreignness. The engravings present him simultaneously as a gentleman and an exotic curiosity.

Those objects were selected and arranged by someone other than the sitter. They tell us about his presentation to a British audience, without establishing what Bennelong thought of his clothes or his visit. Tench’s observation that he might wear British garments one day and carry them in a net on another warns against reading too much into the waistcoat. Wearing it need not have meant everything his hosts hoped it meant.

Interpretation is already at work in these historical objects. An inscription identifies anger; an engraved border surrounds a likeness with objects intended to explain its subject. The surviving portraits preserve Bennelong’s appearance alongside the expectations of those who presented him to their audiences. We risk accepting those expectations ourselves when we treat the portraits as straightforward accounts of the man.

Ross makes her intervention conspicuous. Her fluorescent woman rearranging Glover’s trees is an invention for which the artist takes responsibility. A museum claims a different authority when it explains the past. Its interpretation should withstand scrutiny of the evidence, including evidence inconvenient to its preferred account. A contemporary artist has every right to appropriate an image. The institution has no equivalent freedom to make its history conform to the appropriation.

Revisionism fails when the moral position settles the historical questions. Condemning an abduction is straightforward. Explaining how its organiser represented it, what he admitted and what his governor subsequently understood requires research. An exhibition that gives the historical picture the role of offender and the contemporary work the role of correction can evade that difficulty while congratulating itself on confronting it. The past has been made easier to condemn and harder to understand.

Bradley left unusually revealing evidence. His journal explains the preparations for the seizure and the distress it caused. He recorded an unpleasant duty successfully completed, preserving enough of the prisoners’ response to expose the inadequacy of the governor’s promised friendship. The contradiction belongs to the historical account before any contemporary artist takes it up. He had understood their terror well enough to describe it. He had understood his orders well enough to carry them out.

Sources

• William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales, December 1786 – May 1792, State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library. (Copy in Author’s collection)

• Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales (London, 1793). (Copy in Author’s collection)

• Port Jackson Painter (attributed), watercolours depicting the spearing of Governor Phillip, c. 1790. Watling Collection, Natural History Museum, London.

• Rob Mundle, The First Fleet, Sydney, Harper Collins Publishers Australia, 2014.

• National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams, exhibition essay, 24 August 2024 – 27 April 2025. (Available online)

• National Gallery of Australia, Belonging: Stories of Australian Art, exhibition and accompanying curatorial essay, 24 April 2020. (Available online)

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

On 29 May 1918, Will Dyson was photographed sketching in a sunken road known as the Caterpillar, near Ville-sur-Ancre on the Western Front. The German lines were less than 500 yards away. Ten days earlier, Australian troops had fought to clear the road of German machine-gun positions. Dyson, a former Melbourne newspaper cartoonist who had made his reputation in London, was working within range of enemy fire. He had already been wounded twice, once at Messines and again at Zonnebeke in Belgium, but had returned to the front to continue drawing the Australian soldiers.

Dyson had arrived in France in December 1916, initially without pay, after persuading the military authorities to allow him to work among Australian troops. He had written to General William Birdwood offering to record the character and experiences of Australian soldiers for national preservation. A political cartoonist with strong socialist sympathies, Dyson was fiercely opposed to German militarism and deeply troubled by the mounting Australian casualties. His subjects were the men doing the fighting: soldiers trudging through mud, stretcher-bearers carrying the wounded and infantrymen sleeping in crowded shelters. His drawings made little concession to conventional military heroism. In May 1917, he became Australia’s first officially appointed war artist.

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He had reached the Western Front after some of the worst Australian losses of 1916. The fighting around Pozières and Mouquet Farm had left thousands dead or wounded, and the Somme countryside was devastated. Trees had been shattered, roads broken and whole villages reduced almost beyond recognition. Soldiers lived underground or in improvised shelters, enduring artillery bombardments that could continue for days. Families in Australia learned what they could from censored newspaper reports and letters written by men who often concealed the worst of their circumstances. Those who survived the fighting sometimes struggled to describe what they had experienced.

Australian artists had accompanied military expeditions long before the government established an official war art scheme. In 1885, when New South Wales sent a contingent to Sudan, Arthur Collingridge produced illustrations of its activities for the illustrated press. Fred Leist subsequently depicted scenes associated with the Boer War, including the enlistment of Australian volunteers. Newspapers had long relied upon professional draughtsmen for pictures of distant events, particularly when photographs were difficult to obtain or reproduce. Their illustrations reached the public through newspapers and magazines, with little provision for preserving the original drawings as a historical collection.

Britain and Canada had begun commissioning official war artists in 1916, and Arthur Streeton, then living in London, encouraged Australia to follow their example. Dyson had already secured permission to work among Australian troops. There was good reason to employ artists alongside the photographers and correspondents. The fighting on the Western Front was proving extraordinarily difficult to record, and even the camera presented problems that nobody had quite anticipated.

Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent, had become increasingly dissatisfied with the photographs available to him. Private cameras were prohibited on the Western Front, and the official pictures often told him very little about the fighting he had witnessed. In 1917, Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins were appointed to photograph Australian forces. Hurley, already famous for his Antarctic photographs, soon discovered that the enormous distances involved in a modern battle defeated even his considerable technical abilities. An exposure might capture a shell burst or a few advancing soldiers, while most of the fighting occurred beyond the camera’s field of view.

Hurley’s solution was to combine several negatives into one photograph. He could bring soldiers, explosions and artillery fire into a single composition, giving the viewer an impression of battle that no individual exposure had captured. Bean was furious. These pictures would enter the historical record, and he believed that each photograph should represent an actual occurrence. Hurley argued that his composites came closer to the experience of being there. The dispute became so bitter that he threatened to resign. A limited number of composite photographs were eventually permitted, provided they were identified. For an artist, the disagreement is particularly interesting. Painters had always been free to rearrange what they saw, but Hurley was asking to exercise something of that freedom with a camera. (Australian War Memorial)

An artist standing on the Western Front faced many of the difficulties that frustrated Hurley. Troops were concealed in trenches or shelters, artillery positions might be miles behind the lines, and opposing forces were frequently beyond sight of one another. A painter arriving at a captured village could record its demolished buildings and roads blocked by rubble, while knowing little of the fighting that had taken place there. The great battles of the war could seldom be observed in their entirety. Artists commissioned to depict particular engagements would eventually depend upon military reports, photographs and the accounts of participants.

Australian soldiers had already been making their own pictorial records before the official artists arrived. The Anzac Book, edited by Bean and published in 1916, contained drawings, cartoons, poems and prose contributed by men serving at Gallipoli. The illustrations included caricatures, jokes about military routines and the uncomfortable business of life in dugouts. Officers, regulations and shortages provided plenty of material for ridicule. Men who had been civilians only months earlier brought with them the habits of newspaper readers, amateur artists and cartoonists. Their drawings found an audience among fellow soldiers and subsequently among Australian readers who knew little of the ordinary circumstances of military service.

In December 1916, Dyson made Coming out on the Somme, showing Australian soldiers struggling through rain and mud towards the ruined village of Montauban. Wrapped in waterproof sheets, the men bend beneath their equipment, their heads lowered and shoulders hunched against the weather. They are returning from the front across country devastated by months of fighting. Montauban itself had been reduced to damaged buildings, temporary army huts and supply dumps. Even the journey back from the fighting demanded considerable physical effort, and the men would soon be expected to return to the lines.

Dyson’s years as a political cartoonist had taught him to recognise character in the smallest physical gesture. He was accustomed to exaggerating a posture or expression, often to savage effect. Among the soldiers, he found plenty of subjects whose circumstances required no exaggeration.

In January 1917, he made Writing to catch the home mail, showing two soldiers of the 4th Australian Division writing letters near their billets in the Somme region. One wears a greatcoat and scarf against the winter cold. Both are absorbed in their correspondence, taking advantage of a moment away from their military duties. Their letters would travel thousands of miles to families and friends in Australia, who knew little of the circumstances in which they had been written.

By 1917, Australia was bitterly divided over the war. The enormous casualties on the Western Front had contributed to declining voluntary enlistment, and Prime Minister Billy Hughes had sought public approval for compulsory overseas military service. His proposal was defeated in October 1916, and a second would be rejected in December 1917. The arguments divided families, churches, workplaces and political parties. Those opposed to conscription faced accusations of disloyalty, while supporters warned that Australia’s forces could not be maintained without further recruits. Artists and cartoonists contributed to the increasingly hostile campaigns through recruitment posters, political caricatures and anti-conscription illustrations.

Dyson’s drawings appeared amid these arguments. He supported the Australian soldiers and was fiercely opposed to German militarism, yet his pictures showed men exhausted by marching, sleeping in uncomfortable shelters or carrying their wounded companions. Recruitment posters generally presented military service as a patriotic duty, sometimes promising adventure and comradeship. Dyson had spent months among men who knew precisely what that service involved. His drawings provided Australians at home with an account of military life rarely found in the government’s recruitment material.

Australia had its own reasons for commissioning war artists. Charles Bean, who had accompanied Australian troops since Gallipoli, was determined that the country’s military history should be preserved independently of Britain. He feared that the records of Australian soldiers, their photographs and possessions might disappear into British collections. In 1917, the Australian War Records Section was established in London under John Treloar to collect and preserve that material. Fifteen Australian artists were eventually appointed, among them Will Dyson, Arthur Streeton, George Lambert and H. Septimus Power. Their work would become part of Australia’s permanent record of the war.

The appointments gave artists access to military areas, although where they could go and what they could see depended upon the army. Some worked among soldiers in the field; others recorded hospitals, camps and military installations. Dyson remained with the Australians considerably longer than most, spending much of the next two years drawing the men in France. He received relatively little payment, while his wife Ruby, herself an accomplished artist, remained in London with their young daughter, Betty. The family had every reason to worry about his safety and their finances, but Dyson continued returning to the soldiers.

In Dead beat, the tunnel, Hill 60 (1917), Dyson drew a young Australian soldier asleep in a tunnel during the fighting around Ypres. Still wearing his greatcoat and equipment, the man has slumped forward, his head lowered towards his chest. Other soldiers are barely distinguishable in the darkness behind him. Dyson was particularly affected by the youth of the men he encountered and by the sight of soldiers so exhausted that they could sleep almost anywhere.

In Stretcher bearers near Butte de Warlencourt (1917), Dyson recorded two men carrying a wounded soldier across ground torn apart by shellfire. The bearers struggle to keep the stretcher level as they negotiate the mud and deep shell holes. In his accompanying account, Dyson compared their slipping and lurching progress to boats rising and falling on a rough sea. The stretcher-bearers themselves were frequent casualties, yet their work required repeated journeys across exposed ground, often under fire.

Charles Bean had initially favoured appointing artists already serving in the army, believing they would be better equipped to understand the soldiers’ circumstances. Meeting Dyson in France changed his opinion. Dyson’s drawings convinced him that a professional artist, given access to the troops and prepared to share their conditions, could record aspects of military life that serving soldiers might have neither the time nor the opportunity to draw.

Arthur Streeton travelled to France in 1918, working around Corbie, Villers-Bretonneux and Péronne, where Australian troops had helped halt the German advance. He had spent decades painting Australian and European landscapes, studying the contours of the country, the distances between its features and the effects of changing light. On the Somme, church towers served as observation points, ridges concealed artillery and roads determined the movement of troops and supplies. Many villages had been badly damaged by shellfire.

Streeton was surprised by how little could be seen of the fighting. In a letter to Sir Baldwin Spencer, he wrote that true pictures of battlefields were often unremarkable because almost everything was hidden or camouflaged. He added, with some irritation, that the dramatic battles familiar from illustrated newspapers existed largely in the imagination of people who had never been there. On the Western Front, artillery could fire from positions miles behind the lines, while infantrymen might spend days under bombardment without seeing the enemy. Streeton found himself examining country in which thousands of men were fighting, with scarcely a soldier in sight. (Australian War Memorial)

In The Somme Valley near Corbie, completed in London in 1919, Streeton depicted the country over which Australian troops had advanced during the Allied offensive of 8 August 1918. The Somme winds through the valley, with fields and villages stretching towards the distant horizon. British artillery fire marks German positions along the skyline. Streeton had travelled by ambulance to a hill above Corbie to make his preparatory drawings. He wrote enthusiastically of the trees across the valley floor, the church towers and Villers-Bretonneux in the distance, describing the view as a grand spread. He developed these studies into a canvas nearly two and a half metres wide. The expanse of countryside dominates the painting, while the bombardment is confined to the distant skyline.

Streeton’s preparatory drawings included field guns, ammunition dumps, observation balloons, dressing stations and military positions concealed among trees. Roads and railways carried the men and supplies necessary to sustain the fighting, while horses continued hauling artillery and ammunition across country damaged by shellfire. H. Septimus Power, already an accomplished painter of horses, recorded these animals at work. In Bringing up the guns, completed in 1921, six horses struggle through the mud at Passchendaele, pulling an 18-pounder field gun. Two soldiers on foot help drag the carriage forward. Power had spent years studying horses, and the great effort demanded of these animals provided him with one of his most substantial wartime subjects.

The government was also commissioning large paintings of campaigns that had taken place before the official war art programme began. Gallipoli was an obvious subject. The Australians had landed there in April 1915, and the campaign had ended without an officially appointed Australian artist recording its principal engagements. Photographs, soldiers’ drawings, diaries and military reports survived, but the government wanted substantial paintings for the proposed national memorial. George Lambert was commissioned to paint the landing, an event he had never witnessed.

Lambert had been appointed an official war artist late in 1917 and travelled to Egypt and Palestine, where Australian mounted troops were fighting the Ottoman forces. He drew officers, ordinary soldiers, nurses and local inhabitants, as well as horses and military positions. During 1918 he produced seventy-six drawings, many of them portraits. He was reappointed in 1919, by which time the fighting had ended, to gather material for a series of large historical paintings.

That year, Lambert accompanied Charles Bean to Gallipoli. They spent six weeks examining the country where the Australians had landed and fought four years earlier. Lambert studied the steep slopes and gullies above the beaches, making drawings of the ground over which the soldiers had advanced. Bean brought his knowledge of the campaign and the accounts of men who had taken part. The two men were attempting to establish precisely what had happened on terrain that had proved bewildering to many of the soldiers who fought there.

Lambert began Anzac, the landing, 1915 in London in 1920 and completed it in Sydney in 1922. The enormous canvas shows Australian soldiers climbing the steep hillside above the landing beach, some struggling forward on hands and knees while others lie dead or wounded among the rocks. The hillside occupies most of the painting, with the men scattered across its irregular slopes. Back in London, Lambert used his son Maurice and an Italian model dressed in military uniform to reconstruct the positions of soldiers climbing the rocky ground. His preparatory drawings record individual figures kneeling, crawling and pulling themselves upwards. The finished painting brought those studies into a composition showing several stages of the advance across the hillside. (Australian War Memorial)

Lambert’s Anzac, the landing, 1915 became one of the most familiar Australian images of the First World War. It had been painted for a generation that included men who had survived the landing and families still mourning those who had not. From 1922, it was exhibited as part of the developing national war collection in Melbourne. Its great size and crowded hillside gave Australians a common picture of an event experienced by thousands of men from widely separated positions. Many of those who saw it would have known Gallipoli through newspaper accounts, letters or the testimony of returned soldiers.

The official paintings were entering public collections at a time when the country was still dealing with the immediate consequences of the war. Returned soldiers were seeking employment, families were supporting men with permanent injuries, and memorials to the dead were appearing in towns and suburbs across Australia. Paintings such as Lambert’s occupied a place in this developing culture of commemoration, alongside photographs, personal possessions and the military objects brought home from the battlefields. The government had begun collecting these things while the war was still being fought. Their public display would continue for decades afterwards.

All fifteen Australian artists officially appointed during the First World War were men. Arthur Streeton had recommended Dora Meeson for the scheme, but she received no appointment. Australian women were already recording the war through their own work, among them Hilda Rix Nicholas, whose husband, Major George Matson Nicholas, was killed at Flers in November 1916, five weeks after their marriage. She had drawn his portrait shortly after the wedding. Following his death, she began a series of drawings and paintings of Australian soldiers, eventually including returned men struggling to find employment. No Australian woman received an official war artist appointment until the Second World War.

Rix Nicholas’s In France (c. 1920) was made in Sydney, using returned Australian soldiers as models. They were among the men who had come home to find work difficult to obtain. She had earlier painted A mother of France (1914), a portrait of an elderly woman in Étaples whose son had been killed during the early fighting. Her work extended the record of military service into the lives of those who had suffered its consequences. Women were largely excluded from the official war art appointments, although artists such as Rix Nicholas were recording the experiences of soldiers and civilians without government commissions.

Australian artists continued to record military service through the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and more recent conflicts. In 2025, a group of Australian and New Zealand artists travelled to Greece and Crete, visiting the battlefields and military cemeteries associated with the Allied campaigns of 1941. Their work was exhibited as Lustre at Sydney’s Anzac Memorial in 2026. More than eighty years after the fighting, artists were still returning to the places where Australian soldiers had fought and died.

What survives of a war in public memory depends partly on which images people are given to see. Dyson’s Australia at War: Drawings at the Front was published in 1918, but official war art was otherwise reproduced sparingly in Australian publications during the conflict. As Anne Gray has documented, Australian Chivalry, published by the Australian War Memorial in 1933, concentrated on the major historical paintings and formal portraits, omitting the drawings made in military areas. Those drawings remained in the national collection, but the images selected for reproduction helped establish a public account of the war dominated by important battles and military figures.

On 1 August 1917, near Messines Ridge in Belgium, Will Dyson watched an Australian soldier carving a wooden cross for a dead mate. The man decorated it with an ornate rising sun, the emblem worn by Australian troops. Dyson drew him at work and called the picture The mate. Amid the enormous effort being made to record Australia’s part in the war, here was one soldier making a memorial to another, and an artist who thought the occasion worth preserving.

Following Sydney and Mudgee, Lustre: Contemporary Artists in Greece & Crete runs at Goulburn’s Rocky Hill War Memorial and Museum from 15 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, before travelling to Gosford and Melbourne.

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Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

When I lived in Balmain, the pubs were part of what I loved about the place. No surprise in that for anyone who knows me. At the Dry Dock Hotel, black-and-white and sepia photographs of the shipyards and ships under construction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lined the walls. The Dry Dock opened in 1857, two years after Mort’s Dock, and its name recalled the shipbuilding and repair industry on its doorstep. Balmain had an extraordinary attachment to its past, and more than a little of it rubbed off on me.

The waterfront in those photographs was crowded with workshops and ships of all sizes. Much of it has since been cleared. Around Pyrmont, former industrial land has become public space, while elsewhere sheds and slipways survive where boatyards once occupied much of the shore. The photographs recorded a waterfront I had never known in use.

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The clearance has changed the composition of the shore. A hull above a slipway once stood against workshops, timber stacks and neighbouring vessels. Where a shed survives, it may now stand apart from the buildings that explained its position. An old photograph can account for its angle to the water or the width of the ground beside it. What now appears to be a generous space around a waterfront building may once have been barely enough room to move a boat.

The photographs at the Dry Dock also recorded employment on a scale the present shore scarcely suggests. The workshops at Mort’s Dock manufactured ships’ machinery and equipment for industries well beyond the waterfront. Employment there helped make Balmain a working-class suburb; the Ship Painters and Dockers Union was established at the dock in 1872. The men beside the hulls belonged to trades whose influence extended into the streets around the pub and the labour movement.

Harold Cazneaux photographed Mort’s Dock around 1923. His harbour photographs included industrial sites and vessels as well as family outings beside the water. In the industrial photographs, hulls rise above the men attending to them, exposing their undersides. The workers establish the scale of vessels ordinarily seen with much of their bulk submerged. These photographs record a harbour whose shores accommodated ship repair as well as recreation.

Colonial boatbuilding began within the first year of British settlement, when Robinson Reid, carpenter of the Supply, established a boatshed on the eastern shore of Sydney Cove in December 1788. His Rose Hill Packet, launched the following October to carry provisions to Parramatta, acquired the unflattering nickname ‘the Lump’. Construction of the King’s Dockyard began on the western shore in 1797, roughly where the Museum of Contemporary Art stands today. By 1802 about 28 men were regularly employed there, with a smith’s shop and equipment for steaming timber among its facilities. As the cove became Circular Quay, maritime construction spread towards the western coves and the north shore.

The shipwrights altered those sites to suit their work. John Cuthbert, a Cork-born shipwright who reached Sydney in 1843, established a yard at Milne’s Wharf in Darling Harbour a decade later, then expanded at Millers Point. His business employed an average of about 150 shipwrights, apprentices and other tradesmen, sometimes considerably more. Repairs and refitting supplied its most successful work. In May 1861, the Sydney Morning Herald described the levelled ground and stores for repair materials at his new yard, with a road cut into the rock behind a stone-faced waterfront. British and French naval ships were among the vessels entrusted to him. The rock cutting and masonry were substantial alterations to the shore, capable of outlasting the business that required them.

In Roland Wakelin’s Down the hills to Berry’s Bay (1916), pale roofs follow the water’s edge beneath a taller reddish building. The distant city is reduced to a haze of small upright forms. A seated artist occupies the grassy hillside, which takes up much of the foreground. Across the water, the buildings register as distinct touches of colour. Wakelin’s admiration for E. Phillips Fox and the post-impressionist painting encouraged by Antonio Dattilo Rubbo informed his treatment of this local subject. The working waterfront supplied the closely spaced roofs and walls; the elevated viewpoint set them below the hillside and across a narrow stretch of water.

Boatbuilding had occupied that shore for decades before Wakelin painted it. William Dunn, Walter Ford and William Langford moved their yards to Berry’s Bay during the 1870s. Dunn’s built more than 400 vessels between the late 1870s and 1902. John W. Eaton’s timberyard, with its wood stacks and steam mills, joined the waterfront businesses in the 1880s and supplied building materials for North Sydney. Sheltered water and enough land to build or haul out a vessel determined where the sheds stood. The timberyard added stacks and milling equipment to the buildings along the shore.

Roy de Maistre’s The boat sheds, in violet red key (1919) used the Berry’s Bay buildings for his experiments with colour and music. A violet-red gable occupies the lower centre, with an orange side wall beneath a cream roof. Blue sheds rise behind it towards a house on the hill. The roofs and walls remain distinct despite colours that depart considerably from their probable appearance. Their broad surfaces and abrupt changes of angle gave de Maistre clear divisions between colours without obscuring the buildings’ construction.

The small oil on board was shown in de Maistre and Wakelin’s Colour in Art exhibition. The musical reference in the title belongs to de Maistre’s system of correspondences between notes and colour, in which differences in lightness and saturation also played a part. The exhibition became an early episode in the history of abstraction in Australia. The boatsheds entered that history while still serving the practical purposes for which they had been built.

Sydney Long returned to Wakelin’s viewpoint for his etching Berry’s Bay (1926). The sheds are crowded along the shore, with the masts of a substantial vessel alongside them and their reflections extending into sparsely marked water. Lionel Lindsay’s 1922 mezzotint A nook at Berry’s Bay had concentrated on the boathouses that Long places near the upper centre. Long’s wider view includes the vessels alongside the buildings and more of the surrounding shore. Much of the sheet remains comparatively empty, giving the detailed waterfront a prominence out of proportion to the space it occupies.

The picturesque waterfront had less agreeable qualities for its neighbours. North Sydney’s history of boatbuilding records complaints about noise and untidiness, alongside support from residents who regarded the yards as necessary local industry. The same sheltered shore was desirable for housing. A shed useful to a painter could be a nuisance to someone living next door. The boatsheds had become subjects for modernist paintings while their occupation of valuable waterfront land remained a matter of local dispute.

The yards also built vessels for the recreation of wealthy owners. Ford’s constructed the steam yacht Ena in 1900 to a design by the naval architect Walter Reeks. Much of its hull used Australian timber, with lighter New Zealand kauri selected for the topside planking. Thomas Dibbs used it for entertaining and cruising the harbour. Woodley’s established its boatyard in 1908. Pleasure craft formed part of the waterfront industry, and an expensive yacht brought substantial work to the people who built and maintained it.

Hauled ashore, a boat changes considerably as a subject. The familiar deck and cabin occupy a smaller part of its bulk once the whole hull is exposed. Its weight rests on supports, with space beneath and around it for repairs. The large hull above those smaller supports gives a boatyard picture proportions absent from the same vessel afloat. The dark space underneath allows access to the underside. Even without figures, the arrangement records how the vessel was raised and supported for work.

Along a timber hull’s seams, caulking required an iron of the right width and a mallet to drive hemp or cotton between the planks. The packing tightened the hull while allowing the wood to move. The tools used by shipwright Ron Haug, now held by the Powerhouse, include bent irons for reaching awkward seams. Haug worked on Sydney Harbour as well as further afield. The different irons record the difficulty of reaching joints along the hull, work concealed by the smooth outline of the vessel afloat.

Ship repair continues at Garden Island, where the Captain Cook Graving Dock takes naval vessels out of the water for maintenance and overhaul. John Goodchild’s watercolour Dockworks, Garden Island (1945), painted from naval headquarters at Potts Point, shows work on the wharves and their extensions. In July that year, Max Ragless painted Battleship HMS Anson, showing the ship being towed past Garden Island towards the dock. These wartime subjects add the construction of naval facilities and the movement of large ships to the artistic record of the waterfront. The loss of smaller yards around Balmain and Pyrmont has not brought the harbour’s repair work to an end.

At Lavender Bay, boat repair continued through the years most closely associated with Brett Whiteley and Peter Kingston. Neptune Engineering and Slipway operated there until 1987, with four generations of the Meredith family working in the business. Workshops and artists’ houses belonged to the same small stretch of harbour. Bob Gordon, who first came to Lavender Bay in 1937, built his last boat at the old Neptune site in 2005, continuing after the engineering company had moved away.

Little of that work is visible in Whiteley’s Big Orange (sunset) (1974). Orange water occupies almost the entire surface. Small white boats and elongated reflections are scattered across it, with blue lines tracing the shore and dark foliage pressing up from the lower edge. Neptune was still operating when the picture was made.

Whiteley’s sweeping shorelines and freely drawn boats have become familiar ingredients of Sydney harbour painting. Another blue expanse with a few white hulls can owe more to a remembered Whiteley than the painter intended, especially when the actual view supplies much the same arrangement. Neptune’s workshops have since been removed from the shore. Repeating the familiar harbour composition can pass over this change, treating space created by demolition as though it had always been there.

At the Spit, a Kerry and Co photograph from around 1910 records Lyons’ boatshed and Graham’s slip, with Parrawi Road climbing behind them. There was little room between the road and the workshop. Vessels could be landed there, but the hillside restricted the space available for buildings and equipment. The roofs sit close to the road above them, the yard fitted into the narrow margin between the hillside and the water.

Will Ashton’s House Boats, the Spit, Sydney Harbour (1937) shows vessels altered for another purpose. The houseboats at Pearl Bay included converted tugs and barges, and a former punt that had carried traffic across the Spit before the bridge opened. By 1938 there were nine permanent homes in the group. Ashton painted the dwellings together on the water, with roofs and reflections giving them an appearance both maritime and domestic. The additions sat on hulls designed for other loads, producing the peculiar architecture of housing fitted to vessels made for transport.

At Barangaroo, redevelopment uncovered and preserved Munn’s sandstone slipway from the 1820s and Cuthbert’s seawall from 1865. Boatbuilding had been displaced by later maritime uses long before the cargo port gave way to redevelopment. Cuthbert’s seawall is a surviving example of the waterfront construction his business required; the earlier Sydney Morning Herald report described levelled ground and a road cut into the rock. The masonry records work that changed the water’s edge and outlasted successive uses of the land behind it.

Mort’s Dock underwent a more drastic conversion. After the company’s closure and liquidation in the late 1950s, the dock buildings were demolished and the dry dock filled to make room for a container terminal. Mort Bay Park and housing followed in the 1980s. Low stone walls outline the buried dock in the park. The ground beside the pub passed from ship repair to cargo handling and then to housing and recreation. The photographs on the walls record a vast opening in the ground where ships could be worked on; outside, its outline survives amid a public park.

At Pyrmont, Pirrama Park opened in 2010 on land incorporating the former Water Police base and the earlier Pyrmont Point Park. Public access is a considerable gain. Shores once reserved for particular businesses or services can now be walked along. More water is visible because fewer buildings occupy the land between it and the path. The park has changed the positions from which the harbour can be painted as well as the view itself. Its openness results from decisions about waterfront land as surely as the crowded yards did.

Weathered timber and rust have an established pictorial appeal. They can also encourage a selective account of a place, giving an old shed more importance than its newer neighbours. The earlier artists made markedly different paintings from premises still in use. A surviving shed may now stand beside a path or a building erected after the yard closed. Historical knowledge makes the space around it more specific: the former working area of a yard, cleared and put to another use. The building’s isolation may be the most substantial evidence of what happened there.

At Quibaree Park in Lavender Bay, the Neptune slipway survives within a narrow strip of public waterfront bounded by the railway viaduct. People walk beside ground once used for boatbuilding and repair. The slope that carried hulls between land and water remains, although the workshops have gone. The photographs in the Dry Dock first drew me towards the old yards. Their removal has since made another subject of the shore. The empty ground beside the slipway has as much history as the structure itself. There is still something to paint here. Knowing what happened on this shore gives us more to work with than the view alone.

Sources

Hobbs, Roger. A Shipwright in the Colonies: John Cuthbert, 1815–1874. Nautical Association of Australia, 2017.

Fletcher, Daina, Through a Different Lens: Cazneaux by the Water, Signals, no. 116, September–November 2016.

North Sydney Heritage Centre. Boatbuilding in North Sydney. Heritage Leaflet no. 9, North Sydney Council.

Dictionary of Sydney, Historical entries on the King’s Dockyard and Mort Bay.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

Lee Krasner took a pair of scissors to drawings and paintings she had spent years making. She rearranged the pieces and pasted them onto new surfaces. Some of the resulting collages are among the finest achievements of her career. Most painters have destroyed something they subsequently regretted. Krasner instead found a use for what she had rejected.

She began making collages in 1953, following a period of dissatisfaction with her painting. Two years later, she exhibited them at the Stable Gallery in New York. In the 1970s, she returned to drawings made nearly forty years earlier, cutting them apart and incorporating the pieces into another series.

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Two exhibitions opening this October have brought Krasner back into the international art news. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, while Gagosian in Paris is presenting her first solo exhibition in France1, devoted to paintings and drawings from the 1960s. The Met exhibition traces the full course of both artists’ careers, placing their paintings together in some galleries and separately in others. Its curators explicitly regard them as artistic equals, although the exhibition’s publicity once again invokes Krasner’s emergence from Pollock’s shadow. This is a curious way to introduce a painter whose achievements were recognised by major museums during her lifetime.

Larry Gagosian has spoken of Krasner’s contribution finally receiving recognition on an institutional scale. It is a peculiar claim about an artist whose 1965 Whitechapel retrospective was followed by exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in 1973 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1984. Clement Greenberg admired her collages in the 1950s. The present enthusiasm for rediscovering established women artists sometimes requires a remarkable disregard for what actually happened during their lifetimes. Krasner was an accomplished painter before she met Pollock, and some of her most inventive paintings were made while they were living together.

Krasner’s education began at the National Academy of Design and continued under Hans Hofmann in New York during the late 1930s. Her charcoal studies of the human figure were already accomplished drawings, with heavily reworked anatomy and proportions pushed well beyond naturalism. These drawings were sufficiently accomplished for Krasner to preserve them for decades, although she would eventually find an entirely different use for them.

Hofmann introduced her to European modernism, particularly Cubism. In her charcoal drawings, Krasner began dismantling the figure into intersecting planes, using heavy black lines to establish some contours while obscuring others. The human figure remained recognisable, even as she pushed its proportions and anatomy towards abstraction.

By the late 1940s, she was making the small abstractions known as the Little Images. Some resemble densely packed writing in an invented alphabet; others suggest mosaics, with colour arranged irregularly across the canvas. Black and white dominate some paintings, while patches of red, yellow and blue interrupt the patterns of others. The series gave Krasner considerable room to experiment within the confines of a small canvas.

Krasner was working in an upstairs bedroom at the Long Island house she shared with Pollock, whose much larger studio was in the barn. Around 1950, she returned to more recognisable shapes, but the results disappointed her. None of the paintings she exhibited at Betty Parsons Gallery the following year sold, and she grew increasingly dissatisfied with her black-and-white drawings. Rather than abandon this material altogether, she began cutting up the paintings and drawings she had rejected, using them to make her first collages.

The National Gallery of Australia owns an important example of what followed. Untitled (1953), acquired in 1983, combines oil and gouache with cut paper in a predominantly black-and-white composition. Broad, curving forms have been cut into sections and fitted together without concealing their separate origins. Unlike the densely packed Little Images, the composition gives considerable space to the white areas between its black forms. The cut edges remain conspicuous, making the physical construction of the collage as important as its painted surfaces.

Her admiration for Matisse makes his cut-outs an obvious comparison, although he generally worked with paper coloured for the purpose. Krasner, by contrast, began with paintings she had already rejected, bringing their existing colours and compositions into an entirely new arrangement.

Her collages grew larger during 1954 and 1955. In Bald Eagle, jagged sections of earlier paintings overlap, with broad areas of colour broken by sharp diagonals. The abrupt changes of direction give the composition an almost violent quality, with little to soften the collisions between its different parts.

Bald Eagle is among Krasner’s most crowded collages. Its competing shapes and colours leave little room for the eye to settle, although the larger forms give the composition a discernible structure. Greenberg admired Krasner’s collages for their inventive approach to abstraction. Bald Eagle demonstrates both the possibilities of that approach and the difficulty of controlling so much material within a single painting.

Following Pollock’s death in 1956, Krasner began using the barn studio, where she had room to make much larger paintings. She returned to oil on canvas, working with broad, rounded forms whose proportions sometimes suggest the human body. The change in scale allowed her to develop these shapes across canvases considerably larger than anything she had attempted in the upstairs bedroom.

The Seasons (1957), now in the Whitney Museum of American Art, measures more than five metres across. Great curling shapes extend across the surface, suggesting vegetation and occasionally parts of the human body. Its pinks and greens are surprisingly delicate for such a large painting, with broad cream passages separating some of the larger forms.

The present enthusiasm for rediscovering established women artists sometimes requires a remarkable disregard for what actually happened during their lifetimes.

At this scale, Krasner’s repeated curves form elaborate patterns, with rounded shapes crowded together or overlapping so extensively that their individual outlines become difficult to distinguish. Suggestions of vegetation and human anatomy run through the painting, often sharing the same contours.

The Seasons has frequently been interpreted through Pollock’s death, with its imagery associated with grief and regeneration. The title encourages such readings, although Krasner had been exploring organic forms for years. The painting needs no explanation drawn from Krasner’s private life.

Krasner’s subsequent Umber paintings marked a considerable change in both colour and mood, prompted partly by a practical difficulty. Suffering from insomnia, she began painting at night and found it difficult to judge colour under artificial light. She restricted herself largely to brown and white, producing a series of enormous canvases between 1959 and 1962.

Ochres, deep umbers and near-black browns contrast with passages of white. Some strokes were applied heavily, while others were dragged across the canvas, exposing the surface beneath. Occasional rounded shapes retained something of her earlier organic imagery.

The National Gallery of Australia’s Cool white (1959) is among the largest paintings of the series, measuring almost three metres across. Sweeping passages of umber and white run across the canvas, changing direction sharply and leaving areas of exposed ground. The darker passages vary from broad sweeps to narrower strokes, while the white is alternately painted over the umber and left relatively untouched. Across this enormous canvas, Krasner exploits the contrast between the weight of the brown paint and the open expanses of white.

Several rounded forms, particularly in the lower part of Cool white, resemble eyes. They recall Krasner’s earlier interest in the human figure, although they are difficult to separate from the surrounding brushwork. There are echoes of the organic shapes in The Seasons, but here the suggestion of a body is far less explicit.

Krasner’s Cool white has never enjoyed anything approaching the public recognition accorded to Blue poles, despite the importance of both paintings to the National Gallery’s collection.

Australia acquired Cool white in 1978, five years after the purchase of Pollock’s Blue poles. Both paintings entered the national collection under founding director James Mollison, who was assembling a collection of American modern art before the gallery’s Canberra building had even opened.

Tom McIlroy’s Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting That Changed a Nation (2025) examines how the purchase of Pollock’s painting became a defining episode in Australia’s cultural history. The controversy over its price and the political arguments surrounding its acquisition were only part of the story. McIlroy traces the painting’s subsequent place in Australian cultural life and the extraordinary familiarity it acquired among people who might otherwise have had little interest in Abstract Expressionism. He also gives Krasner considerable credit, recognising her achievements as a painter alongside her contribution to Pollock’s career and the preservation of his reputation. Krasner’s Cool white has never enjoyed anything approaching the public recognition accorded to Blue poles, despite the importance of both paintings to the National Gallery’s collection.

Yet the National Gallery possesses two monumental paintings by artists whose approaches to abstraction were remarkably different. Pollock’s intricate network of poured and spattered paint extends across Blue poles, with eight blue forms asserting themselves against the surrounding lines. Krasner’s broad gestures and comparatively open areas produce a very different composition. McIlroy’s account helps explain how one painting became an Australian cultural landmark while the other remains relatively unfamiliar.

Melbourne owns another important Krasner. The National Gallery of Victoria acquired Combat (1965) through the Felton Bequest in 1992. At more than four metres wide, it belongs to the period in which she resumed painting in brilliant colour, following the sombre palette of the Umber paintings.

Hot pink forms cross a vivid orange canvas, their enormous curves folding back upon themselves and enclosing irregular areas of orange. The colours are almost aggressive, but Krasner uses them with greater economy than the pale organic forms of The Seasons. The pink curves remain distinct even where they approach one another, while the orange between them has a presence equal to the painted forms. The result is a composition considerably more open than The Seasons, despite its equally extravagant scale.

Krasner continued to explore these larger compositions throughout the 1960s. Comet (1966–70), included in the Gagosian exhibition in Paris, shows how far she had moved from the crowded imagery of The Seasons. Broad white strokes cross green and magenta forms, with large areas of warm-coloured ground left exposed. In places, the white conceals much of the underlying colour; elsewhere, the green and magenta remain visible along its edges.

During a visit to Paris in 1956, Krasner spent time at the Louvre, and her admiration for Matisse remained an important part of her artistic education. His influence is apparent in the bold colour combinations of Comet, but Krasner was doing something quite different with them. Where Matisse carefully arranged the shapes of his cut-outs, she worked with broad sweeps of paint, allowing one colour to cover another. Her debt to Matisse is unmistakable, although the painting bears little resemblance to his methods.

Towards the end of the 1960s, Krasner was also experimenting with gouache on paper. In 1974, she rediscovered a portfolio of charcoal drawings from her years studying with Hofmann. She kept some intact and used others to make a new series of collages, exhibited at Pace Gallery in 1977 under the title Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See.

In the new collages, Krasner sometimes turned pieces of paper over, exposing faint charcoal impressions on the reverse. Other sections retained recognisable portions of the original studies, although their arrangement bore little resemblance to the figures she had drawn as a student. Even the reverse sides of the paper offered material that had not been apparent when the drawings were intact.

In Imperative (1976), Krasner arranged sections of her old charcoal drawings alongside pieces painted green, yellow and red, leaving others white. The colour introduces something entirely new to material originally conceived in black and white. Some sections retain substantial portions of the early drawings, while others contain little more than a trace of charcoal. The differences in age and treatment remain evident, even as the separate pieces form a new composition.

Her first collages had been assembled largely from paintings she had rejected. The Hofmann drawings presented a different proposition. Carefully preserved for decades, they demonstrated how accomplished she had been as a student, long before Abstract Expressionism had acquired its name.

I regard these late collages as some of her finest paintings. They owe much to the quality of the original drawings, but their achievement is not simply that Krasner found another use for them. In Imperative, the early charcoal and the later colour belong to the same painting without losing their separate identities. Krasner had made something quite distinct from either the original drawings or the collages of the 1950s.

Krasner was already an accomplished painter before she made her first collages, and her subsequent changes in scale, colour and method were not necessarily advances on what had come before. Her collages, Umber paintings and later abstractions reveal the range of her achievement without suggesting that each new phase surpassed the last.

Krasner’s willingness to abandon an established method is all the more remarkable when it had produced paintings she had every reason to value. She was prepared to reconsider even her most accomplished achievements when she saw possibilities elsewhere. She had begun by cutting apart paintings she could no longer accept. More than twenty years later, she was prepared to cut apart drawings she had every reason to admire.

Exhibitions

Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s, Gagosian, 4 rue de Ponthieu, 75008 Paris, 19 October – 18 December 2026

Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue, Gallery 899, Runs until 31 January 2027

Sources and Further Reading

• Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (William Morrow, 2011).

• Eleanor Nairne (ed.), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

• Tom McIlroy, Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting That Changed a Nation (Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2025).

• David Breslin and Brinda Kumar, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2026).

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, New York, 4 October 2026–31 January 2027.

• Gagosian, Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s, Paris, 19 October–18 December 2026.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

One hundred and eighty-seven paintings should be far too many for a commercial gallery exhibition. Works compete for attention, wall space disappears, and the whole thing risks becoming unreadable. Domenico de Clario’s Arles at Jacob Hoerner Galleries confounds that expectation.

The installation photographs stopped me before I knew much about the exhibition. Small and medium-sized panels sit on purpose-built shelves, sometimes seven or more to a run, their edges forming an almost continuous line through the gallery. It is practical and unexpectedly handsome. Greens, yellows, reds, blues and violets recur; so do cypresses, roads, fields, Montmajour, Saint-Rémy, the Alyscamps and the Camargue. One painting catches the eye, another edges in beside it, and the shelf keeps carrying you along.

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A more conventional arrangement would have given each work a generous patch of white wall. The result might have been calmer, perhaps more luxurious, certainly easier to take in. The shelves give each painting enough space to be seen while keeping the sheer quantity before us. With this many works to accommodate, that is a considerable achievement.

The number comes from Vincent van Gogh, who made 187 paintings during his fourteen months in Arles in 1888 and 1889. De Clario, who lived there until only recently, decided to match it. The paintings were first installed in the church of Saint Genest in Arles before being transported to Australia earlier this year. Jacob Hoerner presents them both as individual works and as one body of painting. In St Kilda, each picture can be looked at on its own, but none is entirely free of the 186 around it.

Matching Van Gogh painting for painting is a risky business. One hundred and eighty-seven then, 187 now. The correspondence is exact; the exhibition it produces is less predictable. Arles is hardly neutral ground either. Van Gogh has painted himself into its cypresses, orchards, bridges, yellow walls and the Rhône at night so thoroughly that the place is difficult to see without him.

For an Australian audience, Arles is already familiar ground, largely because Van Gogh made it so. Many Australians will know the painted town better than the actual one. De Clario has made the reverse journey. Born in Trieste in 1947, he came to Australia in 1956, made most of his career here, and later lived in Arles before returning to Melbourne in 2026.

De Clario’s earlier work makes 187 paintings rather less surprising. De Clario has a long habit of keeping things after most people would have discarded them, and of finding elaborate ways of parting with what he has held onto.

Edward Colless’s 1997 Monash University Gallery survey, The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty, included All of My Clothes, 1980–1997. The title is wonderfully exact. Seventeen years of clothing had become a work. The same survey included a game of squash played beneath a full moon. Colless treated the exhibition almost as a portrait because de Clario had made the boundaries between art and biography so difficult to maintain.

De Clario has never been much interested in reducing things to a neat selection.

At the 1999 Liverpool Biennial he worked across seven sites over fourteen nights, following the moon, with performances lasting from sunset until dawn. Blindfolded drawing and music recur throughout his career. There have been long walks, repeated songs, readings measured in hours, solstice performances and works that continued for a predetermined length of time. His recent CV includes a twenty-four-hour reading and keyboard performance of Joyce’s Ulysses, alongside continuing musical and site-based work in Australia and Arles.

The moons, solstices, numbers, cycles and blindfolds can sound elaborate when listed together. Someone has to stay awake through the night, keep playing, keep walking, keep going until the work is finished. De Clario has repeatedly imposed those demands on himself and carried them through.

That habit of keeping things found its most extreme expression in Tonglen. In 2016, near Mildura, he placed decades of possessions into a pit the size of a swimming pool: furniture, books, clothes, letters, children’s toys, garden tools, remnants of earlier installations, two cars and a trailer. Some had belonged to his parents. One of the cars had been with him for thirty-five years.

“Buried his past” would make a convenient headline and miss the stranger point. De Clario wanted the objects kept together. He did not want them scattered through a tip or dispersed one by one. Even getting rid of them meant keeping them together.

Clothes worn over many years stay together. Family possessions remain intact until they are buried together. Letters are kept. Earlier material reappears in later work. De Clario parts with things, but rarely by simply throwing them away.

Against that history, 187 paintings seems entirely characteristic of de Clario.

At Jacob Hoerner, all 187 sit on purpose-built shelves, an arrangement first suggested by de Clario and developed with Hoerner. The paintings are close without becoming cluttered. One panel comes forward, another recedes, a third catches the eye beyond it. The effect is surprisingly fluent, closer to reading a sequence of objects than moving from one isolated painting to the next.

The shelves are first read as runs of colour: yellow, blue-green, ochre and violet, broken by darker panels and a few sparser compositions. Move closer and roads, trees, fields and buildings emerge more clearly.

The paintings are rougher than their Provencal subject matter might suggest. The paint is often spare and abrasive, with patches of bare wood left visible and the image built from only a few forceful marks. In one panel, an orange-brown tree stands against an olive-green field. Elsewhere a yellow road cuts through a dark blue-green landscape, carrying much of the composition while the surrounding vegetation is knocked in with quick black, blue and green strokes.

Another picture is almost entirely yellow, ochre and pale green, the vegetation reduced to slashing verticals and diagonals. Pale trunks run through the heat of the image; brown branches catch against the yellow ground. The brushwork is brisk, sometimes dry, sometimes slippery.

The darkest panels are built from blackened greens, greys and deep blue-violets, with only a few passages of turquoise, yellow-green or dull red keeping the image open. Trees become vertical masses rather than described forms. Light appears as a patch rather than an atmosphere. In places the landscape almost gives way altogether, though de Clario never quite lets it disappear.

Some paintings are dominated by yellow and ochre, with more exposed ground and lighter passages; others are denser, darker and built from darkened greens, greys and blue-violets. In one, colour carries nearly everything. In another, the paint has been scrubbed back until the image hovers on the edge of legibility. Roads and trees recur without becoming a formula.

The supports vary too. Some are compact and square, others longer and more horizontal. A found piece of wood interrupts the regular panels. The changing proportions stop the display settling into a procession of identical units.

Identical supports, evenly spaced, would have made the display monotonous. De Clario’s paintings bunch, stretch, square up, change size and then return to familiar proportions. The shelves let the differences remain visible without making the display look disjointed.

The titles keep Van Gogh close: Sunset at the Alyscamps, Evening of June 5 in the Alyscamps, Two Cypresses and Meadow near Montmajour, Two Cypresses on the Road to Tarascon, Fourteen Cypresses near St Remy, Camargue Dusk, Night Falling over St Remy, Vincent Over Montmajour. On paper, the titles make the Van Gogh connection unmistakable.

The paintings themselves are less deferential. Cypresses, roads and sunsets recur as subjects de Clario has returned to repeatedly, rather than as quotations from Van Gogh.

De Clario lived in Arles for several years. His recent work there includes paintings at Saint Genest, moonrise over the rhone / arles and auvers-sur-oise, a field of yellow flowers, performances, music, drawings and found objects.

Van Gogh remains unavoidable because de Clario has chosen to match his number exactly. At seventy-nine, he hardly needs the association to give the exhibition weight.

Making this many paintings is another matter. Roads, trees and fields return because de Clario paints them more than once, sometimes with very different results. The quantity is not an abstract idea once the paintings are in the room.

With so many paintings, some will hold the eye longer than others. A few assert themselves immediately; others work better beside neighbouring paintings; some may simply be weaker. Nothing in the hanging disguises those differences.

Painting usually reaches a gallery after hard editing. Pictures are often left out of the final account, repetitions fall away, and several years’ work can emerge looking remarkably assured. Arles leaves more of the making visible: one painting followed by another, colours returning, motifs revisited, with the process of repetition and adjustment still apparent.

Colour carries across the room. A yellow or red panel is visible before its subject is clear; violet, green and blue recur further along the shelves. One yellow painting answers another several metres away. From a distance the exhibition becomes a long band of colour and shape; closer in, it separates into individual paintings.

The continuous shelving gives the room a clear horizontal structure while the different sizes, colours and handling keep the display from becoming monotonous. There is no need for grander language. It is very good hanging.

A commercial gallery still has to let each painting be seen individually. The shelving does that without breaking up the group. A collector can concentrate on one panel without losing the sense of the larger display.

The paintings may not remain together after the exhibition. Some may be sold individually; others may stay together. For now, the full group is visible in one room. De Clario has long kept things, sometimes for years, before returning to them in another form. Clothes become artworks. Family possessions are eventually buried together. Letters are kept too.

That provisional arrangement suits de Clario, who has long kept objects and materials close at hand, sometimes returning to them years later. Clothes become artworks. Family possessions are kept for years and eventually buried together. Letters are kept too.

He first wrote to Van Gogh when he was eight. It is an appealing story, though childhood encounters with art are too easily turned into prophecies once the adult career is known. De Clario continued to write to him.

On 20 February 2026, 138 years after Van Gogh arrived in Arles, a permanent work by de Clario was inaugurated at 2 Place Lamartine, where the Yellow House once stood. Commissioned by the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, it consists of two brass boxes stacked in reference to the building’s two storeys. It is also a working mailbox. Letters to Vincent can still be posted there.

The work is both memorial and functioning postbox. De Clario’s childhood correspondence with Van Gogh, resumed later in life, has become a permanent work in Arles.

The paintings have travelled in the opposite direction. Made in France and first shown together at Saint Genest, they have crossed the world to St Kilda. For Australian viewers, Van Gogh and Arles come with them, but so does de Clario’s long career here.

Since 1966 de Clario has presented more than 300 exhibitions, installations and performances. He taught at RMIT for more than two decades, later headed art schools at Edith Cowan and Monash, and directed the Australian Experimental Art Foundation. His work is represented in major collections in Australia and overseas. The 187 paintings belong to a career that has also included prolonged performances, repeated actions, stored objects, journeys, burials and music.

Longevity earns no exemption from criticism. But the scale of Arles makes more sense in the context of a career built around prolonged tasks, repetition and persistence. Van Gogh supplied the number. De Clario was well practised in seeing difficult undertakings through.

The question was never whether 187 paintings were too many. They plainly are. The more interesting fact is that de Clario and Hoerner have found a way of showing all of them without asking us to forget it.

Domenico de Clario: Arles, Jacob Hoerner Galleries, First Floor, Pleysier Perkins, 89 Wellington Street, St Kilda, 1 October – 7 November 2026

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

No. 3 / 2026

Readers of my recent essay Artists with Something More to Say might reasonably accuse me of hypocrisy for producing a newsletter devoted to exhibitions after poking fun at the weekly parade of supposedly unmissable shows. My quarrel was with indiscriminate praise, not the idea of recommending exhibitions. These six interest me for different reasons, and I see no contradiction in recommending an exhibition while reserving the right to find fault with it. Indeed, I rather hope readers sometimes expect me to.

Ben Crawford: The Colour of Dreams, the Shape of Memory

Boom Gallery, Geelong | 5 – 28 November 2026

Irish-born, Queensland-based painter Ben Crawford has little regard for the natural colours of a landscape. Rivers turn pink, trees burn orange and human figures are sometimes reduced to little more than marks among the vegetation. In The Colour of Dreams, the Shape of Memory, his forthcoming exhibition at Geelong’s Boom Gallery, he puts these liberties to good use.

Three paintings caught my eye, each placing the human figure in a quite different relationship with the landscape. In Untethered (2026), a resting figure looks across a river towards three people in a boat. A broad reflection of light separates them. In Salt on the Tongue, the boat is pushed into the distance, almost lost on an expanse of water framed by dark foliage. The Sting of the Dying Season is altogether more forceful, with a blazing canopy above a solitary figure bent among the undergrowth. Crawford’s paintings move between landscape and memory, with colour and the arrangement of forms doing as much as the recognisable subject to establish the character of each picture.

Crawford has also written eleven poems for the exhibition, which he is self-publishing in handmade chapbooks, each with an individually hand-painted cover. It is an enterprise that Wallace Berman, the American artist associated with the Californian Beats, might have appreciated. Between 1955 and 1964, Berman produced nine issues of Semina, his remarkable handmade publication combining poetry, photography and visual art, circulated largely among friends and fellow artists. I haven’t read the poems, but the prospect of a painter taking responsibility for both the writing and the physical object is appealing.

Whether Crawford’s poetry shares the imaginative freedom of his painting remains to be seen. The three pictures I’ve seen are reason enough to look forward to the exhibition, and the prospect of eleven handmade chapbooks makes the trip to Geelong all the more appealing.

Michael McHugh: Two Worlds

Martin Browne Contemporary, Paddington, Sydney | Runs until 24 October 2026

Michael McHugh’s botanical inventions have never been particularly obedient to nature. Plants sprout improbable appendages, marine organisms resemble exotic flowers and the whole lot is painted in colours that would give a botanist a headache. There is considerable skill behind this extravagance. McHugh’s appetite for intricate detail gives his compositions much of their richness, rewarding the viewer who takes the time to examine them closely. His new exhibition, Two Worlds, brings together paintings and, for the first time, hand-blown glass sculptures.

The paintings follow a 2025 residency at Château de Cerisay in France, where the winter landscape and the château’s moat provided an unlikely counterpart to Sydney’s Clovelly Beach. McHugh recalls the sensation of swimming beneath the surface at Clovelly, an experience that helps explain the peculiar mixture of botanical and marine forms in his paintings. Anyone expecting the French countryside to have moderated his appetite for colour will be disappointed. Bright Spark, Saturation Point and Chromasia are positively riotous, their surfaces packed with invented species, polka dots, stripes and patterns of almost microscopic intricacy. There is scarcely an inch of canvas left unoccupied, yet McHugh distinguishes one improbable specimen from another through changes of scale, colour and pattern. The pleasure is in discovering just how much he has managed to squeeze into a single picture.

McHugh’s new glass sculptures are every bit as exotic as his paintings. The hand-blown vessels sprout tentacles, horns and peculiar bulbous appendages, their brilliant blues and greens recalling the marine organisms and imaginary plants that populate his canvases. Pacific and Pelagic have something of the exuberance of Venetian glass, while the spotted green Baublicious looks like a botanical specimen that has escaped from a particularly eccentric greenhouse. McHugh has transferred his familiar imagery into glass, but the change of material introduces transparency, reflected light and three-dimensional form into an imagination already unusually well supplied with extravagant possibilities.

Tiarnie Edwards: Accomplices

Martin Browne Contemporary, Paddington, Sydney | Runs until 24 October 2026

A dingo in a balaclava carrying a Molotov cocktail is not your usual piece of Australian wildlife art. Nor are kangaroos in streetwear or a gang of four squat characters dressed as superheroes. These are among the twenty ceramic sculptures in Accomplices, an exhibition by Tiarnie Edwards, a Ngarrindjeri artist raised on Nauo Country in South Australia. Edwards graduated from the University of South Australia in 2023 and has already assembled a wonderfully disreputable collection of native animals. Her sense of humour is wicked, although the references to Aboriginal resistance and Australia’s colonial history are anything but incidental.

Edwards builds her figures by hand, giving them ungainly proportions, exaggerated heads and rough, granular surfaces beneath their bright colours. In Live Laugh Light It Up, a masked dingo brandishes a flaming bottle, an unlikely advocate for the cheerful domestic philosophy suggested by the title. Elsewhere, four squat figures stand shoulder to shoulder in brightly coloured shirts, a superhero quartet unlikely to use their powers for the public good. The modelling is wonderfully assured in its apparent clumsiness. Oversized heads, stubby limbs and improbable accessories give these characters considerable personality, while their coarse surfaces preserve something of the pleasure Edwards evidently takes in handling clay.

Edwards draws freely upon comic books, popular culture and the history of Aboriginal resistance, without allowing the subject matter to overwhelm the sculptures. Her animals are too peculiar, too comical and too individual to serve merely as illustrations of political grievances. These are audacious sculptures from an artist who graduated only three years ago, and I suspect Accomplices will be one of the more entertaining exhibitions in Sydney this month.

Stephen Ormandy: Listening

Olsen Gallery, Woollahra, Sydney | Runs until 17 October 2026

Stephen Ormandy: Listening

Stephen Ormandy has returned to Olsen Gallery with an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and music across its two Woollahra premises. His paintings have an unmistakable character: broad areas of saturated colour, curving outlines and abstract compositions that can suggest human figures without quite describing them. His palette is often startlingly direct, with several contrasting hues occupying a single canvas. The results can be lively, peculiar and occasionally unsettling, particularly when the figures begin to resemble bodies whose anatomy has undergone some extraordinary rearrangement.

In Conversation (2026), two arrangements of colour occupy opposite sides of a terracotta canvas. Their proximity suggests a pair of figures, perhaps in discussion, although the black circles, irregular limbs and contrasting passages resist any straightforward account of what we are seeing. Deity is more enigmatic. A large orange form surrounds a much smaller blue one, suggesting something between an idol, a ceremonial object and a figure enclosed within another body. Neither painting requires us to identify its subject. Their strength lies in Ormandy’s ability to sustain several possible readings without sacrificing the abstract composition.

The exhibition also includes resin sculptures and music, extending Ormandy’s practice into media that have occupied him for many years. His sculptures are particularly revealing in relation to the paintings. The broad contours that appear so assured on canvas become substantial objects, with volume and an entirely separate physical presence. There is a temptation to describe Ormandy’s paintings as playful, but the word does little justice to the inventiveness of an artist who has pursued his own vocabulary of abstraction over several decades. Their brilliant colours may be the first thing one notices, but the stranger pleasures lie in the compositions themselves and in Ormandy’s willingness to leave them open to interpretation.

Jane Burton: Nightwood

Bett Gallery, Hobart | 16 October – 7 November 2026

Jane Burton has spent much of her career photographing women in rooms where something appears to have gone terribly wrong. Her deserted houses, dimly lit interiors and shadowy landscapes owe something to the Gothic imagination, although the unease in her photographs is generally of her own making. In Nightwood 2 (2026), a naked woman sits beneath a bridal veil, her face concealed and her legs exposed. Behind her are glazed doors, dark foliage and an ornate pedestal. A network of fine cracks covers the image, giving it the appearance of an old painting whose surface has begun to deteriorate. It is an arresting photograph, with the theatrical arrangement of the figure held in check by the ordinary furnishings of the room.

The bridal veil is an obvious invitation to speculate about innocence, marriage and the exposure of the female body. Burton has made such interpretations almost too readily available, but the photograph has more to offer than its symbolism. The covered head almost disappears against the darkened glass, while the pale fabric falls across the woman’s body and spreads over the floor. There is something distinctly uncomfortable about the contrast between the ceremonial veil and the exposed flesh beneath it. Burton has arranged the scene with considerable precision, but she leaves the circumstances of the woman’s presence in the room entirely unexplained.

Nightwood is partly autobiographical, drawing upon Burton’s childhood memories and including photographs of a dead tree. There is little advance material available beyond this single photograph, but it provides ample reason to anticipate the exhibition. Burton has held some forty solo exhibitions, including her twenty-year survey Eye of the Beholder in 2009. If Nightwood 2 is representative of the new series, there should be plenty here to satisfy admirers of her particular brand of photographic theatre.

Glenn Morgan: Out From Under The Bed

Four Eight Four, Carlton, Melbourne | 8 – 17 October 2026

Glenn Morgan has made something of a career out of being a glorious nuisance. His paintings and sculptures are crowded with the peculiarities of Australian life, from suburban streets and country race meetings to political protests and the occasional national disgrace. His humour can be affectionate, vulgar or positively savage, depending on who has attracted his attention. The apparently unruly compositions are more carefully constructed than their cartoonish figures might suggest. Morgan has a considerable gift for organising chaos, and an equally impressive willingness to offend.

A look at Morgan’s recent paintings gives some idea of his range, from the everyday absurdities of Melbourne commute(2025) and Warrnambool May races (2024) to the more pointed political commentary of Stop seismic blasting (2024). He is quite capable of making his subjects ridiculous while treating their concerns seriously. His humour depends as much on his observation of human behaviour as on his considerable talent for exaggeration.

Morgan’s sculptures are no less outrageous than his paintings. His ingenious, sometimes mechanically operated constructions have the appearance of inventions assembled by someone with a mischievous disregard for conventional engineering. A finalist in the 2025 Maquette: Sculpture Award, Morgan was also selected for the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize with COVID Self portrait 2. Even a self-portrait can become an excuse for an argument with the world.

Morgan’s appearance at Four Eight Four in Carlton is something of a departure from his usual exhibitions with Australian Galleries. The gallery itself is easily overlooked, its unassuming exterior concealing an impressive line-up of artists. It is worth seeking out in its own right. There is almost nothing available about Out From Under The Bed beyond a black-and-white promotional image depicting a congested city of crooked buildings, their windows scattered about with little regard for architectural convention. Has Morgan been hiding something, frightening himself or simply rummaging through the studio? Whatever has been lurking beneath the bed, he has apparently decided it is time the rest of us had a look.

A Plea to Galleries

Commercial galleries understandably concentrate their publicity on current exhibitions. Yet there is something to be said for giving forthcoming exhibitions a little more attention. A few advance photographs and some useful information can encourage independent criticism and introduce an artist to an audience well beyond the gallery’s regular clientele. The larger publications may have their own arrangements for obtaining advance material, but smaller independent publications can also bring serious attention to an exhibition. A good preview ought to benefit everyone, not least the artist. Although, depending on what the critic has to say, there are no guarantees.

Latest from This Art Life

Heads, Rooms and Flowers

Three significant Australian artists, David Fairbairn, Peter Wegner and Edmond Thommen, are exhibiting in Sydney within weeks of one another, each beginning with the human figure and finding much more.

THIS ART LIFE I ANDREW MCILROY

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Andrew

David Fairbairn’s portraits, Peter Wegner’s figures and interiors, and Edmond Thommen’s photographs of women and flowers make a strong case for the continuing richness of figurative art in Australia. Their individual achievements are worth examining, but so too is what becomes apparent when their art is considered together.

David Fairbairn has been drawing heads for decades and keeps going long after a likeness has been established. In Head of A.M. No.2, 2025–26, shown in the 2026 Salon des Refusés at the S.H. Ervin Gallery and now included in a new Nanda\Hobbs exhibition, charcoal, pastel, ink and paint cross the forehead, crowd the eyes and run through the mouth. Earlier lines remain visible beneath later ones. Blue cuts across the face without describing flesh, becoming part of the structure of the head rather than its natural colour, while the room behind has been reduced to chairs, walls and a few hard divisions. The sitter remains unmistakable.

A competent portraitist could have stopped much earlier. Fairbairn does not. His hand moves rapidly across the face, one contour giving way to another as he builds the head through a succession of vigorous, deliberate marks. The drawing has the energy of something done at speed, yet every mark has its purpose.

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David Fairbairn, Peter Wegner and Edmond Thommen are all exhibiting in Sydney within weeks of one another. Fairbairn and Wegner work with portraiture and the figure; Thommen with the photographed female body. Each begins with the human figure, but none is content merely to record what is in front of him.

Fairbairn trained at the Royal Academy in London before moving to Australia in the 1980s. He won the Dobell Drawing Prize in 1999 and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2002, and portraiture has occupied much of his career. His forthcoming exhibition at Nanda\Hobbs, Proof of Identity, continues his concentration on heads and figures.

Proof of Identity is an apt title for pictures in which identity depends on considerably more than accuracy. A line may pass straight across a cheek without describing it; another may reinforce the brow until the head seems almost cut into the paper. Several versions of an eye can remain visible at once.

His method is now so distinctive that a Fairbairn head is recognisable from across a room. That familiarity could easily become mannerism. It does not, because each sitter remains physically distinct: the proportions of the face, the set of the mouth and the shape of the head are still their own. The Fairbairn is immediately recognisable, but so is the sitter.

In one recent seated figure, the person occupies a blue room while lines pass across body, chair and wall. The chair receives as much concentration as an arm, and the wall is not filled in after the figure has been established. Fairbairn draws person and room at once. His lines cross the boundaries between them without confusing one for the other.

None of this would work without his command of drawing. Fairbairn can pull a line away from the contour of a face because he knows perfectly well where that contour lies. He can redraw an eye several times without losing the skull beneath it. There is a considerable difference between distortion and simply not knowing how to draw. Fairbairn gives us the former.

Peter Wegner also draws with great assurance, but Reminisce: Paintings from life, at King Street Gallery on William, extends well beyond the sitter. There are portraits, including Elisabeth Cummings, but also couches, armchairs, tables, folded cloth and domestic rooms. Fairbairn concentrates upon the head. Wegner is just as interested in the things people have handled, occupied and worn.

Wegner has been exhibiting for more than forty years. He won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2006 and the Archibald Prize in 2025 with his portrait of Guy Warren at 101, while his portrait of Cummings was a finalist in the 2026 Archibald. Those prizes have inevitably reinforced his reputation as a portrait painter, but the furniture and interiors in Reminisce are no digression.

A couch is not an especially forgiving subject. It can become dreary very quickly, or quaint if a painter decides old upholstery requires affection. Wegner avoids both. Cushions sag, fabric loosens and throws lie where somebody has left them. He does not burden the couch with symbolism. Years of use have already given him enough to paint.

The chairs and tables are much the same. They have been sat on, shifted, leaned against and lived with. An empty chair could easily become a solemn statement about absence, but Wegner has the good sense to resist the temptation. It remains a chair, worn by use and worth painting for that reason.

Portrait painters usually require a sitter. Wegner can manage after the sitter has gone. His interiors are filled with the things people have lived with.

Wegner has given the passage of time equally close attention in his portraits. His Centenarian Project began with a drawing of his aunt Rita at 104 and developed through portraits of men and women who had reached a hundred while continuing to live with mobility, curiosity and purpose. Wegner has written about dignity and independence in old age. In the portraits, the years are visible in faces, hands and posture. In his interiors, they appear in worn cloth, upholstery and furniture that has been used for decades.

In Elisabeth, included in Reminisce: Paintings from life, Wegner paints the artist Elisabeth Cummings seated against a dark blue ground, her patterned dress and folded hands carrying as much weight as the face. Her age is plain, but there is nothing fragile or sentimental about the portrait. Cummings meets the viewer directly, and Wegner lets the years show without allowing them to become the subject. Her standing as an artist will mean something to those who know her, but the painting does not depend upon it.

Wegner begins directly on raw canvas without first fixing the composition in a preparatory drawing. He may turn a canvas sideways or upside down, or inspect it in a mirror while painting. Artists can make ordinary studio procedures sound heroic, but here the information is worth knowing. Changes remain visible in the paint without making the pictures look laboured.

His drawing often disappears into the paint. A head, chair or fold of cloth can look as though it has been put down with very little effort. Fairbairn leaves his revisions in full view. In Wegner’s paintings, they are absorbed into the finished surface.

Wegner builds the figure through paint. Edmund Thommen begins with a photograph. Proportion, contour, skin and pose have already been recorded before he introduces flowers, dried plants, bubbles and other photographic images. under her skin #8, opening at M2 Gallery in Surry Hills in November, continues his use of the female body within these layered photographic compositions.

Thommen never leaves the body alone. In The True State of Bliss, pale roses spread across the figure, covering parts of the body and cutting through its outline. Possessed by Flowers is darker and more theatrical, while in Regeneration Begins #1, dried botanical forms sit so close to the body that flesh and vegetation become difficult to distinguish.

Thommen achieves something that many painters and collagists using similar ingredients do not. Flowers, bodies and decorative pattern can sit stubbornly on the surface, one element pasted over another until everything has the weight of wrapping paper. His photographs have depth. Petals, stems, skin and shadow occupy the same space, and the body retains its physical weight rather than becoming another flat shape in the design.

Regeneration Begins #1 is the clearest example. Nothing looks pasted onto the photograph. Despite Thommen’s deliberate combination of the body and dried plants, the finished composition has a convincing sense of physical depth.

In Dos mujeres con flores artificiales, Thommen comes close to decoration, but the two women remain substantial presences rather than simply part of the floral arrangement. Elsewhere, the flowers interfere more directly with the body: a stem crossing a torso, a flower cutting into the line of a shoulder, flesh and vegetation briefly difficult to separate.

There is something of the odalisque tradition in the reclining bodies, flowers and partial concealment. The eroticism is unmistakable. Fairbairn and Wegner give us particular people; Thommen sometimes gives us the body first.

The risk in photographs of this kind is not pornography but decoration. Beauty itself is hardly something to apologise for, and the female nude has endured enough moral instruction without needing another lecture about whether it is permissible to see one. A beautiful body surrounded by flowers can, however, become pleasing with almost indecent ease. Thommen makes no attempt to disguise the artifice.

In Dos mujeres con flores artificiales, even the title acknowledges it. The women, the flowers and their arrangement are all part of a carefully constructed image. The pleasure of looking at it comes as much from Thommen’s invention as from the beauty of his subjects.

Fairbairn, Wegner and Thommen all begin with the human figure, but none is content merely to describe it. Fairbairn can redraw a head almost beyond description and still leave the sitter intact. Wegner follows his subjects into the rooms and among the objects of their lives, without turning those things into substitutes for the people who used them. Thommen is dealing with the nude rather than the portrait, and the distinction is important. He can partly conceal the body without losing the woman in the arrangement. In each case, the figure gives the artist more to do than simply describe a person. It remains one of the richest subjects an artist can have.

Postscript: This essay is not intended as a comprehensive account of the three exhibitions. My purpose is to consider how three very different artists use the human figure, what each makes of it, and why it continues to offer such rich possibilities for artists.

David Fairbairn - Proof of Identity, Nanda\Hobbs, Sydney from 5 - 21 November 2026

Peter Wegner - Reminisce: Paintings from life, King Street Gallery on William, Sydney until 24 October 2026

Edmond Thommen - under her skin #8, m2 Gallery, Surry Hills, Sydney from 19 November to 7 December 2026

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

As an artist who has ventured into writing and podcasting, I have a personal interest in the opportunities now available to artists who have something more to say. The freedom is considerable, but so is the potential for nonsense.

An artist can spend years making art, only to find themselves at an exhibition opening being asked to speak to their earliest artistic memory. The question is generally delivered with such solemnity that answering it honestly might be considered an act of aggression. The artist may have far more entertaining opinions about the art world, although expressing them within earshot of the gallery director might be unwise.

Independent publishing offers artists the chance to put such opinions to better use, although the results may not be entirely welcome. Those who can write or possess a talent for broadcasting can develop an audience quite separate from their artistic practice. A publication might become an achievement in its own right, attracting readers who have never heard of the author’s art. An impressive exhibition history will be of little assistance, however, when the competition involves constructing an interesting paragraph.

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An axe to grind is no substitute for literary ability, either. An artist whose exhibition proposal was rejected ten years ago might devote the remainder of their life to writing about the curator responsible. With sufficient determination, the grievance could outlive them both. The internet has already demonstrated that the ability to publish and the possession of something worth publishing are entirely unrelated accomplishments.

Artists have been writing for centuries, sometimes brilliantly. Established critics can hardly be blamed for their reservations about the flood of online commentary, much of it produced by people whose acquaintance with their subject appears to have begun during the journey home from an exhibition. Serious criticism is harder to find, although accomplished critics recognise it wherever it appears. Their complaints shouldn’t automatically be dismissed as professional jealousy. Much of what’s being published really is dreadful.

Professional criticism requires more than access to information. It demands knowledge of art, experience and the ability to form an independent opinion. An artist may possess practical knowledge unavailable to a critic, but knowing how to make something doesn’t necessarily qualify anybody to write intelligently about it. There’s room for new contributors who can meet the required standards, although it would be unfortunate if everybody interpreted this observation as a personal invitation.

Podcasting has its own hazards, some apparently borrowed from the banality of FM breakfast radio. Everybody is absolutely thrilled. The guest is amazing, the exhibition fabulous and the presenter overcome by the privilege of conducting the interview. Forty minutes later, the listener has learned practically nothing about the artist but could probably write a character reference for the presenter.

A decent interviewer might begin by asking a question to which they don’t already know the answer. Artists have experiences worth hearing, including some that might contradict the agreeable accounts of creative fulfilment associated with these conversations. A little disagreement wouldn’t hurt, provided the interviewer could resist interrupting long enough to discover what the disagreement was about.

Neither writing nor broadcasting need be confined to art. A musician should be perfectly capable of discussing a novel without explaining how it informed their latest composition. An artist might begin researching another artist’s correspondence and find themselves absorbed in a quarrel that lasted twenty years. There is considerable satisfaction in pursuing an interest simply because it has captured one’s curiosity, without having to explain its relevance to anything else.

A readership may eventually include people interested in buying the artist’s own creations. Selling art is important, and reaching prospective buyers directly is an opportunity worth taking seriously. But cultivating readers through the quality of one’s writing is rather different from treating every subscriber as a potential customer, or insisting upon calling them a collector.

That particular word has acquired an almost religious significance among certain art consultants. Social media is awash with advisers addressing their iPhones at such close quarters that one fears for the camera lens. They are invariably off to meet a collector, advising a collector or sharing something terribly exciting with their collectors. One suspects that a person who wandered into a gallery and bought a painting simply because they liked it would be enrolled as a collector before the credit card transaction had cleared. The word suggests privileged access to a cultivated clientele and, by association, expertise on the part of the adviser. Neither necessarily follows.

I have a weakness for the old-fashioned art dealer. Some were appalling snobs, and the better ones could be even worse. But a dealer who knew their artists could spend an afternoon arguing the merits of a particular painting without consulting the exhibition catalogue. They might insult your taste in the process, but at least you were getting an education. Their commercial interests were obvious, which saved everybody the inconvenience of pretending otherwise. The better dealers championed artists for decades, sometimes against prevailing taste and at considerable commercial risk. There was rather more to such relationships than making introductions.

Good consultants continue that tradition. Their knowledge may prevent an expensive mistake, and they should occasionally possess the confidence to recommend buying nothing at all. Unfortunately, social media has encouraged another variety for whom a studio visit becomes a personal discovery, complete with a photograph in which the consultant occupies rather more space than the painting. The artist may deserve every word of praise, but when everybody is fabulous, one wonders what vocabulary remains should the consultant ever encounter a masterpiece.

Artists who write or broadcast can dispense with much of this ceremony. Somebody might follow a publication for months before discovering that its author is also an artist. Readers deserve more than another version of the gallery mailing list, announcing an unmissable exhibition every Thursday. An entertaining essay could bring an unfamiliar artist to public attention without its author having anything to sell. Better still, the writing might persuade readers to form opinions of their own, even when those opinions differ considerably from the author’s.

There is also room for mischief, provided the writer knows the difference between mischief and libel. Museums have spent years celebrating artists who challenge authority. An artist who takes this encouragement rather too seriously and begins questioning the museum itself may discover that institutional affection for rebellion has its limits.

An independent writer might investigate a controversial decision without having any personal involvement in it. Artists sometimes possess knowledge that can expose weaknesses in an official explanation, although such investigations require evidence rather than suspicion. Dismissing an awkward argument as the complaint of a disgruntled artist is considerably easier than answering it, particularly when those making the accusation may have a few grievances of their own. The writer must establish the facts, and those being criticised are entitled to challenge them.

Independent publishing isn’t going away, although the quantity of rubbish it produces occasionally makes a persuasive case for bringing back the editor. Some writers would benefit enormously from being told that their latest contribution should never have progressed beyond an unpleasant thought. Others may produce articles that established publications ought to have commissioned themselves. There are neglected artistic careers, exhibitions that have escaped serious criticism and subjects the established press rarely finds room to discuss. An artist who acquires a readership only to devote it to settling old scores has succeeded in becoming their own least interesting subject.

The prospect of more artists writing or broadcasting is appealing, provided they resist the temptation to regard having a platform as an intellectual achievement. Some may become accomplished commentators whose influence extends well beyond their art. Others may discover that their opinions were considerably more impressive before they published them. Occasionally, the writing might prove more interesting than the art. That should give everyone something to discuss at the next exhibition opening.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

The contrasting receptions of two Australian documentaries, ‘Silenced’ and ‘Cancelled’, raise uncomfortable questions about artistic freedom and political allegiance. The treatment of artists such as Deborah Conway exposes the professional cost of expressing unpopular opinions. That an artistic community which prides itself on dissent should punish artists for exercising that same freedom is a perverse state of affairs.

Critic John McDonald has issued a pointed challenge to Australia's cultural establishment. In his essay Silenced & Cancelled, he accuses sections of our cultural establishment of practising precisely the intolerance they claim to oppose. He begins with two documentaries whose receptions could hardly have been more different. Selina Miles’s Silenced opened the Sydney Film Festival, while Danny Ben-Moshe’s Cancelled, following four Jewish Australian artists, struggled to secure screenings and distribution. McDonald questions why certain accounts of injustice attract enthusiastic support while others struggle to find an audience. It is an accusation that deserves examination, particularly when the people deciding which artists receive opportunities are themselves among the loudest advocates of freedom of expression.

Silenced attracted considerable praise, although Elizabeth Weitzman, writing for TheWrap, was less impressed. The documentary follows Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson and women including Brittany Higgins and Amber Heard, examining how legal proceedings can be used against women reporting sexual abuse. Weitzman admired the women’s testimony but questioned Miles’s handling of the material. She was particularly critical of the glamorous treatment of Robinson, with its close-ups of high heels and slow-motion sequences, which she felt did the lawyer a disservice. With so many individual cases competing for attention alongside the wider #MeToo movement, she found the documentary insufficiently focused. An important subject does not necessarily make an accomplished documentary.

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In Cancelled, Ben-Moshe recorded his subjects’ experiences as events unfolded, rather than assembling their stories in retrospect. Sanadze’s establishment of Goldstone Gallery became part of that story, which eventually reached the December 2025 Bondi terrorist attack. Deborah Stone, writing after the Melbourne premiere, described how profoundly the documentary affected her, despite having reported extensively on its subjects. Ben-Moshe and producer Jamie Bialkower believe the film’s rejection by broadcasters and festivals reflects a reluctance to present Jewish perspectives. Their explanation remains open to dispute, but the film deserves consideration for what it records.

Conway’s experience is particularly revealing. In 2024, an open letter calling for her removal from Perth Writers’ Weekend attracted approximately 500 signatures. Protesters subsequently disrupted one of her performances in Hobart. Her remarks about Palestinian children, which she subsequently explained were directed at Hamas, had attracted fierce criticism. The controversy continued when the Brunswick Ballroom cancelled a concert scheduled for November 2025 following protests and concerns about staff safety. The campaign had extended to preventing her from performing. She was a musician promoting her music and memoir, not a politician seeking public office. Disagreeing with her opinions was one thing. Attempting to deny her a platform was quite another.

There is a considerable irony in Deborah Conway finding herself in this position. In 1985, she became famous as the lead singer of Do-Ré-Mi, whose hit Man Overboard was something of a feminist anthem. I remember seeing the band perform at my first union night at Melbourne University that year. The university was a hotbed of political activism, and Conway fitted the times perfectly. I’ve never forgotten that performance. Her explicit lyrics and attacks on male sexual attitudes were hardly calculated to please conservative Australia. Forty years later, Conway finds herself challenging attitudes within a cultural community that might once have celebrated precisely that sort of defiance. She has hardly lost her appetite for an argument. What has changed is the willingness of her own cultural community to tolerate one.

Then came the controversy surrounding Adelaide Writers’ Week in January 2026. More than 180 writers withdrew following the decision to exclude Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah, who had herself signed the earlier letter demanding Conway’s exclusion. Conway publicly questioned where these defenders of free expression had been when she faced demands for her own removal. The circumstances were not identical, but her question deserved an answer. Freedom of expression had become a cause around which writers could organise, although Conway had found far fewer willing to defend her own participation in cultural life.

There is something peculiarly satisfying about being a rebel when practically everyone at the meeting agrees with you. Australian cultural life has acquired a professional class remarkably comfortable with the vocabulary of dissent. Resistance, disruption, transgression and the overthrow of established thinking are familiar promises in exhibition announcements. Yet the people making these promises frequently occupy senior positions, control the budgets and select the artists. They are the establishment, although one suspects that telling them so might provoke another symposium.

An earlier generation of Australian artists had good reason to challenge the institutions of its day. Conservative tastes and limited opportunities left many struggling for recognition. Their successors inherited a rather different art world, with expanded galleries, increased public funding and university courses devoted to movements that had once offended respectable opinion. What was once an act of rebellion had become an expectation.

An artist today can question society, religion, capitalism and almost any established belief. Question the political sympathies of the gallery director offering you an exhibition, however, and the reception may be rather less enthusiastic. There is something amusing about an establishment that encourages artists to challenge authority, provided they choose the right authorities.

A New Puritanism

I suspect a new puritanism has taken hold in an artistic community that prides itself on permissiveness. The old puritans objected to sexual impropriety, blasphemy and offences against public morality. Their prohibitions were extensive, and they were seldom troubled by doubts about their own righteousness.

Today's puritans hold entirely different convictions. Many would regard themselves as the natural enemies of traditional puritanism. But the appetite for correcting other people’s opinions has survived remarkably well. Disagree with the accepted position and suddenly it may be your character, rather than your argument, that comes under examination.

Artists have always challenged accepted opinion. Now, it seems, they are expected to agree with one another.

For an artist, expressing an unpopular opinion can have immediate consequences. Losing an argument is one thing. Losing your studio and discovering that former friends no longer want you around is quite another.

An Artist Among Friends

On 31 July 2026, Melbourne artist Nina Sanadze told the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion how her life had changed following the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. A private message in which she described Hamas as animals became public when a Jewish Australian group chat was leaked. She testified that she subsequently lost friendships, professional opportunities and her place in Melbourne’s artistic community.

Sanadze described being questioned about her political beliefs and told that returning to the studios of an arts organisation would be inappropriate. She also alleged that she had been warned further damaging information could be released unless she left. These were allegations made in her testimony, not findings against the organisation concerned.

In early 2025, Sanadze established Goldstone Gallery in Melbourne, explaining that Jewish artists were finding it difficult to secure exhibitions. The gallery presented art, poetry, music and discussions involving Palestinian and Israeli women. Funding and security difficulties subsequently forced it to suspend its regular exhibition programme, although it briefly reopened for two performances in July 2026. Having lost her place in an established artistic community, Sanadze had attempted to create an exhibition space for herself and others.

An artistic community that celebrates dissent ought to be capable of accommodating an artist whose political opinions offend her colleagues. If Sanadze’s account is accurate, her experience suggests that tolerance has its limits.

Nobody needs to issue an official prohibition. An invitation may never arrive, an exhibition proposal can be rejected and professional relationships may deteriorate. The public generally hears about artists who have been selected, not those who have been passed over.

The Venice Contradiction

In February 2025, Creative Australia appointed Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, only to withdraw their appointment six days later. Parliamentary and media criticism of two earlier artworks preceded the decision, with the organisation citing fears of prolonged public controversy. Resignations, protests and an independent review followed. On 2 July 2025, Creative Australia reinstated the pair and apologised. Having appointed them, dismissed them and appointed them again, it had spent almost five months arriving at its original decision.

Artists and arts organisations had been prominent among those demanding Sabsabi’s reinstatement. Christopher Heathcote, in his essay A Venetian Fiasco, examined an awkward detail. Some of the people defending Sabsabi had previously signed a petition calling for a boycott of Israel’s participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale, a campaign that would also have affected its nominated artist, Ruth Patir. Sabsabi himself had signed it. Heathcote cited journalist Deborah Stone’s identification of at least 211 names appearing on both petitions. Heathcote questioned why artists who had supported that campaign subsequently defended Sabsabi’s participation on the grounds of artistic freedom. He also distinguished between an artist’s freedom to exhibit and the decision to appoint that artist to represent Australia internationally.

Creative Australia’s previous support for Sabsabi was extensive, including a major award and an international residency. Yet its leadership was poorly prepared when questions about his earlier art reached Parliament. The independent review identified shortcomings in preparation and decision-making. It found no single predominant cause for the withdrawal and acknowledged that the board had exercised its judgement in accordance with its statutory obligations. The organisation had supported Sabsabi for years without adequately preparing itself to defend its latest appointment.

The Pleasure of Being Right

The experiences of Conway, Sanadze and Sabsabi were different, but each became caught in a political dispute with consequences for an artistic career. Their circumstances became public. How many similar disputes are settled quietly, behind closed doors, is harder to establish. We know who receives exhibitions, appointments and funding. We know rather less about the people who are passed over, or why.

I am less interested in declarations about artistic freedom than in what happens when somebody puts them to the test. Supporting an artist whose opinions coincide with your own requires little sacrifice. Supporting somebody whose opinions you find objectionable is considerably less comfortable, particularly when your colleagues are watching.

Perhaps the new puritans have more in common with their predecessors than they would care to admit. Both possess strong convictions, an impressive confidence in their righteousness and a considerable enthusiasm for correcting other people’s opinions. The contemporary version has the additional satisfaction of believing itself to be permanently engaged in rebellion.

There is, after all, very little courage involved in challenging opinions that nobody around you holds.

Sources

Abelsohn, Jessica. “The Film About Cancel Culture That Got Cancelled”. The Australian Jewish News, 31 August 2026.

Conway, Deborah. “Where Were These Artists When the Pitchfork Mob Cancelled Me?” The Australian, 23 January 2026. (Deborah Conway transcript)

Creative Australia. “Creative Australia Releases External Review”. 2 July 2025.

Heathcote, Christopher. “A Venetian Fiasco”. Substack, 8 May 2026.

Holmes, Adam. “Deborah Conway Concert in Hobart Interrupted by Pro-Palestinian Protesters”. ABC News, 28 May 2024.

McDonald, John. “Silenced & Cancelled”. Everything the Artworld Doesn’t Want You to Know, 25 September 2026.

Pin, Phoebe. “Antisemitism Inquiry Hears from Jewish Australian Artist ‘Cancelled’ After Private Group Chat Doxxing”. ABC News, 31 July 2026.

Stone, Deborah. “These People Don’t Believe in Censoring Art … Unless It’s Israeli”. The Jewish Independent, 20 February 2025.

Stone, Deborah. “On Despair: A Reflection After Watching ‘Cancelled’”. The Jewish Independent, 18 September 2026.

Weitzman, Elizabeth. “‘Silenced’ Review: Post-#MeToo Doc Addresses Worldwide Misogyny (and So Much Else)”. TheWrap, 25 January 2026.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

Australian religious art has many histories. This article examines one of them: the contribution of Christian painting to Australian cultural history and modernism, from the European paintings collected for Melbourne’s churches to Justin O’Brien, Leonard French and the Blake Prize. Understanding these paintings requires an understanding of Christianity, but judging their quality demands something more than religious conviction or prejudice against it.

There is a magnificent seventeenth-century French painting tucked away in the baptistery of Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral. I came across it years ago without knowing anything of its history. What surprised me was how little I knew about the European paintings acquired for Australian churches during the nineteenth century, or how rarely they appeared in accounts of our early cultural history.

The painting is Jesus in the Temple Found by His Parents, associated with Jacques Stella and dated 1642. It was brought to Melbourne by James Alipius Goold, the city’s first Catholic bishop and subsequently its first archbishop. Goold assembled a substantial collection of European religious paintings, an undertaking that belongs in any serious account of the city’s early cultural history.

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In 2016, the art historian Jaynie Anderson identified the Melbourne painting as Stella’s original altarpiece, commissioned for the Jesuit novitiate church in Paris, where Nicolas Poussin and Simon Vouet also received commissions. Stella had spent years in Italy, enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu and the French court, and maintained a close friendship with Poussin.

Anderson’s attribution is disputed. The French scholar Sylvain Laveissière argues that the Melbourne painting is an early copy and that Stella’s original is the version at Les Andelys in Normandy. The distinction is considerable, both for Stella’s place in French painting and for our understanding of Goold’s collection.

The subject comes from Luke’s Gospel. Mary and Joseph, having searched Jerusalem for their missing twelve-year-old son, discover him among the teachers in the Temple. The composition accommodates numerous figures without losing sight of the encounter between Christ and his parents. Their emotions are treated with considerable restraint, and the painting itself is superb. Whether the Melbourne picture is Stella’s original or an accomplished early copy, its quality is not in question for me.

A bishop and his collection

Goold was an Irish Augustinian who had received much of his religious education in Italy. He arrived in Melbourne shortly before the gold rush, charged with establishing Catholic institutions for a rapidly expanding population. His appreciation of European painting would become apparent in the scale of his collecting.

In April 1852, Goold obtained permission to export 135 Old Master paintings and ten modern pictures from Rome without paying customs duties. A newspaper report from August 1853 records the arrival of a substantial consignment, principally intended for St Francis’ Church in Melbourne. The paintings were predominantly Italian, and several were evidently very large. It was an extraordinary undertaking for a bishop establishing the Catholic Church in colonial Melbourne.

Goold also commissioned William Wardell to design St Patrick’s Cathedral. Wardell’s Gothic Revival architecture and Goold’s predominantly Italian Baroque paintings belonged to different centuries, although their combination would have been familiar in European Catholic churches. Goold wanted Melbourne’s churches to possess something of the artistic richness he had known in Italy.

Jaynie Anderson, Max Vodola, Shane Carmody and their colleagues have examined Goold’s paintings, library and architectural patronage through the University of Melbourne’s research project The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect. Their scholarship has considerably expanded our knowledge of his collecting and Melbourne’s early cultural history.

Goold’s purchases included copies, paintings of uncertain attribution and pictures of varying quality. He was furnishing churches rather than assembling a public gallery, and the requirements were different. Subject, scale and suitability for worship could take precedence over attribution. The Church had commissioned some of Europe’s finest paintings, but it had also filled its buildings with thoroughly ordinary ones. Goold’s collection reflected both aspects of that history.

Australian art history has concentrated heavily on colonial landscape and portraiture and the establishment of public galleries. Meanwhile, European paintings were entering Melbourne’s churches. Goold’s collection belongs in that account, although the religious importance of an individual picture tells us little about its quality as a painting.

Goold was importing European paintings, not establishing an Australian school of religious art. Australian-born painters, including Adelaide Ironside, had already taken up biblical subjects. Nor is there an uninterrupted tradition connecting his collection with twentieth-century Australian modernism. By the postwar years, however, Australian painters were finding their own uses for European religious imagery.

Justin O’Brien

Justin O’Brien’s The Virgin Enthroned, painted in 1950–51, won the inaugural Blake Prize and was subsequently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria through the Felton Bequest. The triptych presents three biblical subjects. Adam and Eve occupy the left panel, the enthroned Virgin and Child the centre, and the Baptism of Christ the right. O’Brien adopted a traditional religious format while exercising considerable freedom in his treatment of the individual subjects.

His debt to Byzantine and early Italian painting is apparent in the elongated figures, shallow space and simplified landscape. During the Second World War, while serving in Greece, O’Brien encountered Byzantine art, and his subsequent European travels extended his knowledge of religious painting. He understood the possibilities offered by these earlier painters and found his own uses for them.

The triptych is particularly accomplished in its organisation. Each panel has its own composition, but O’Brien brings the three together through carefully controlled colour, repeated vertical forms and a continuous landscape. His figures are arranged according to the requirements of the painting rather than conventional perspective or naturalistic proportions. The central Virgin retains the authority of the traditional Marian image, although O’Brien has made the subject entirely his own.

Writing about O’Brien’s 2011 retrospective, John McDonald identified the blue expanse of water surrounding the Virgin’s throne as an allusion to Sydney Harbour. He also recognised the influence of Piero della Francesca in the painting’s geometric construction. McDonald’s suggestion is appealing. An Australian landscape may have found its way into one of Christianity’s most familiar subjects without disturbing the painting’s debt to its European predecessors.

The National Gallery of Victoria also possesses a preparatory drawing for The Virgin Enthroned. Ursula Hoff, writing in the gallery’s 1952 bulletin, compared O’Brien with Georges Rouault. I’m not entirely persuaded. Rouault’s heavy outlines, distorted figures and expressive colour bear little resemblance to O’Brien’s measured compositions. Their common interest in Christian subjects seems insufficient reason to associate their paintings so closely.

O’Brien subsequently received commissions for Australian churches, including the chapel of Cabrini Hospital in Melbourne and the Church of Mary Immaculate at Ivanhoe. Religious institutions were prepared to commission him, even as his own relationship with Christianity was changing.

Barry Pearce’s 2011 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Justin O’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, examined his religious paintings alongside portraits, landscapes and still lifes. It offered a broader account of an artist whose reputation had become closely associated with biblical subjects.

By the mid-1950s, O’Brien had become agnostic. He preferred to describe himself as a painter of religious subjects rather than a religious painter. His personal convictions had changed, but his knowledge of Christianity and its artistic inheritance remained. He continued to paint biblical subjects without professing the beliefs that had originally inspired them.

Nothing about O’Brien’s agnosticism diminishes The Virgin Enthroned. His understanding of Christian imagery was essential to the painting, but its quality rests upon what he accomplished with that knowledge.

Leonard French

Leonard French’s Death and Transfiguration of 1958–59, now in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Joseph Brown Collection, takes considerably greater liberties with the conventions of Christian painting.

The dead Christ lies horizontally across the lower part of the composition. Above him, a second figure rises with arms extended. French has brought death and resurrection together, reducing the figures to schematic forms and dispensing with almost every familiar detail of biblical narrative. There are no mourners, little anatomical description and no attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of either event.

How much can an artist remove from an established religious subject before its identity becomes dependent upon explanation? Without its title, French’s composition might suggest death and resurrection, but its specifically Christian meaning would be considerably less certain. I find the reduction convincing as painting. The opposing figures provide a powerful composition, although French has sacrificed much of the narrative to achieve it.

How much can an artist remove from an established religious subject before its identity becomes dependent upon explanation?

His choice of materials is equally deliberate. A former signwriter, French possessed considerable knowledge of commercial enamels, and Death and Transfiguration is painted in enamel on composition board. The medium suited his interest in sharply defined forms and the organisation of colour. French has made the religious subject serve the painting, rather than allowing the subject to dictate its appearance.

French also drew upon Byzantine art, particularly its simplified figures, decorative surfaces and treatment of colour. His interest in its pictorial conventions accompanied his experiments with enamels and metallic surfaces, which he developed further in his Campion series. First exhibited in Sydney in 1960, these paintings took the life of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion as their subject. French had previously explored classical mythology in his Iliad series, exhibited in 1951. Christianity and classical literature provided him with subjects through which he could pursue his increasingly abstract painting.

In 1963, French received the commission for the enormous stained-glass ceiling of the new National Gallery of Victoria, designed by Roy Grounds. It remains his most conspicuous public achievement, but his earlier paintings demonstrate the extent of his investigations into abstraction, colour and materials well before that commission.

O’Brien and French had both studied early European religious painting, but their approaches were markedly different. O’Brien retained the recognisable biblical figure and the traditional altarpiece. French was prepared to sacrifice much of the narrative in pursuit of abstraction. Neither allowed the conventions of religious painting to determine what he could accomplish with his chosen subject.

The Blake Prize

The Blake Prize was conceived in Sydney in 1949, with its first award presented in 1951. Its founders were dissatisfied with the religious pictures commonly found in Australian churches and drew inspiration from the European Sacred Art Renewal Movement. They believed contemporary Australian painters could produce something considerably better.

There was a difficulty, however. The prize could encourage artists to investigate religious subjects, but it could not guarantee that churches would welcome the results. O’Brien’s inaugural victory demonstrated the problem. The Virgin Enthroned was an exceptional religious painting, yet it entered the National Gallery of Victoria rather than a church. The distinction exposed the distance between what contemporary painters might produce and what churches were prepared to accommodate.

Religious institutions had legitimate expectations of the pictures they commissioned. A congregation needed to understand what it was looking at, while contemporary painters were increasingly prepared to abandon familiar religious imagery. But how much artistic independence could a church accommodate, and how far could a painter depart from Christian imagery before a religious commission became meaningless? These were genuine artistic questions, not simply disagreements between conservative churchmen and progressive painters.

As the Blake developed, abstraction became increasingly prominent, and its interpretation of religious art expanded. Artists were no longer necessarily concerned with biblical narratives or recognisable Christian imagery. The organisers had invited contemporary painters to exercise their independence, and the prize increasingly reflected the artistic interests of those who entered it.

Religious conviction guarantees nothing when it comes to making a good painting, but dismissing a picture because of the beliefs that inspired it is equally indefensible.

Rosemary Crumlin examined this history in her 1984 exhibition at Monash University, The Blake Prize for Religious Art: The First 25 Years – A Survey. Bringing together paintings by Leonard French, Roger Kemp, John Coburn, Asher Bilu, Stanislaus Rapotec and others, she documented the increasing prominence of abstraction and the widening range of subjects represented.

The Blake subsequently welcomed artists working within other religious traditions, along with those whose interpretations bore little resemblance to conventional religious pictures. What began as an attempt to improve the paintings found in Australian churches had become something considerably broader. That expansion was artistically productive, although it also complicated the prize’s original purpose. A painting might satisfy the Blake’s increasingly expansive understanding of religious art while having little conceivable place in a church.

Crumlin continued her investigations with Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, presented at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998. The exhibition brought together Australian and international artists, including Colin McCahon, whose use of biblical language and Christian imagery was closely connected with his treatment of the New Zealand landscape.

The Blake’s changing character should not be mistaken for a failure of its original intentions. Its founders had wanted contemporary artists to take religious painting seriously, and they succeeded in persuading artists to investigate subjects that Australian modernism might otherwise have neglected. But the question of what constitutes a good religious painting remained unresolved. The prize could recognise artistic achievement without establishing whether a painting also fulfilled its religious purpose.

Back to St Patrick’s

St Patrick’s Cathedral is a familiar refuge from the noise of Melbourne. I visit often and invariably spend time with the painting associated with Stella. It is an extraordinary painting to find in an Australian cathedral, yet I suspect relatively few visitors know anything about it.

Too often overlooked, religious paintings such as this remain in darkened corners and side chapels, scarcely noticed. Many others were removed or discarded following Vatican II, as churches were reordered and historic interiors stripped of their decoration. I remember some of the resulting sanctuaries resembling contemporary living rooms more than places of worship. Whatever the intentions behind those changes, much of considerable artistic value was lost.

Christianity’s contribution to Australian painting deserves to be examined without either defending the Church or allowing prejudice against religion to dictate our judgement. Religious conviction guarantees nothing when it comes to making a good painting, but dismissing a picture because of the beliefs that inspired it is equally indefensible. We should be capable of judging these paintings on their merits without disregarding the religious history that produced them.

I admired the painting in St Patrick’s long before I knew anything of its disputed attribution. Knowing more about its history has only increased my admiration.

Selected sources and further reading

Anderson, Jaynie. “Visible and Invisible: Jacques Stella in Melbourne.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 158, no. 1357, April 2016, pp. 245–250.

Anderson, Jaynie, Max Vodola and Shane Carmody (eds.). The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2019.

Pearce, Barry, and Natalie Wilson. Justin O’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010.

Crumlin, Rosemary. The Blake Prize for Religious Art: The First 25 Years – A Survey. Monash University Gallery, 1984.

Crumlin, Rosemary (ed.). Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

Sidney Nolan was not interested in painting wine labels. When Denis and Tricia Horgan approached him about contributing to the Art Series at Leeuwin Estate in Western Australia, he reportedly explained that he was not a graphic artist. The Horgans sent him two unlabelled bottles of their 1982 Cabernet Sauvignon. Nolan evidently liked what he drank. He reconsidered, and his painting Dolphin Rock subsequently appeared on their Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon. I wonder whether two bottles of indifferent Australian red would have produced the same result.

His reluctance was perhaps understandable. Nolan was hardly the first important painter to be approached about decorating a commercial product, and he had accepted commissions of considerably greater consequence. But a wine label must have seemed a modest destination for his painting. The Horgans had seen what was happening in Bordeaux, where some of the greatest names in twentieth-century art had been persuaded to contribute to the appearance of an expensive French wine.

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In 1924, Baron Philippe de Rothschild decided to bottle the entire production of Château Mouton Rothschild at the estate rather than continue sending wine to merchants in barrels. To mark the occasion, he commissioned Jean Carlu, an accomplished French poster artist, to produce a new label. Carlu incorporated the château’s ram emblem into a geometric composition indebted to Cubism. It was a considerable departure from conventional Bordeaux wine labels.

The experiment was not immediately repeated. In 1945, celebrating the Allied victory, Rothschild commissioned Philippe Jullian to produce a label featuring a large V. Thereafter, a different artist was invited each year, eventually bringing Braque, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Dalí and Francis Bacon into the collection. The château acquired the original paintings and drawings, while customers acquired the wine and its accompanying reproduction. Some bottles became collectors’ items, and the announcement of each year’s artist became an event in its own right.

The Horgans adopted the idea in Margaret River, beginning in 1980 with Robert Juniper’s painting of Caves Road on their first Art Series Chardonnay. Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Olsen, Fred Williams, Albert Tucker, Lloyd Rees and others followed. Leeuwin’s collection now contains more than 150 artworks, some commissioned specifically for the winery and others purchased from exhibitions. Many of the originals can be seen in its gallery.

It is an impressive collection, although the distinguished list of names can discourage criticism of the labels themselves. Not every important painting survives reproduction on a wine bottle. Some lose much of their character when reduced, while others appear almost to have been made for the purpose. Leeuwin has acquired some exceptional Australian paintings, but that doesn’t make every one of its labels a success.

I wonder what Nolan might have done with two bottles of indifferent Australian red.

John Olsen’s Frogs in Riesling is among the successes. Olsen produced four paintings for the Art Series Riesling, and Leeuwin bought all four. His wandering lines, scattered forms and irreverent humour survive reproduction remarkably well. Olsen could make a few apparently careless marks do considerably more than most painters achieve with an entire canvas. His frogs have been appearing on Leeuwin’s Riesling for decades, and I cannot think of a good reason to replace them.

Leeuwin has also featured Aboriginal Australian artists on its Art Series Shiraz labels, including Minnie Pwerle, Ngarra and Tommy Carroll. Their inclusion broadens an already distinguished collection and introduces another substantial tradition of Australian painting to the series. I’d be interested to see more of these labels, particularly how the paintings survive reproduction on such a small scale.

Leeuwin was not alone in recognising the possibilities. During the 1990s, Peter Lehmann Wines commissioned a succession of Australian artists to interpret its Queen of Clubs, a playing-card figure inspired by Lehmann’s affection for Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls. The results varied considerably in style and quality, with each artist bringing an individual interpretation to the familiar subject.

Anelia Pavlova produced one of the most memorable Queens. Commissioned in 1995 to produce a label for the company’s Semillon, her monoprint depicts an elongated woman with a pale face, a slender wineglass and exposed breasts. Pavlova’s peculiar proportions and rather theatrical figure bear little resemblance to conventional playing-card illustration. The image also reproduced exceptionally well on the label.

The Americans were less impressed. The exposed breasts caused difficulties with the authorities responsible for approving imported wine labels, and Pavlova had to produce a second version with the offending anatomy covered. There were objections in Britain too, although the uncensored version eventually went on sale there. An Australian Semillon had managed to provoke an international argument over a pair of breasts on a playing card.

An Australian Semillon had managed to provoke an international argument over a pair of breasts on a playing card.

The episode is amusing, but it also tells us something about the limitations of these commissions. Whatever artistic freedom Pavlova had enjoyed, Peter Lehmann still had wine to sell. The company was hardly going to sacrifice an overseas market for the sake of an exposed breast. Fortunately, the original Queen survived and remains one of the more entertaining examples of Australian art finding its way onto a wine bottle.

Peter Lehmann eventually abandoned the individual artists’ interpretations in favour of a more uniform presentation developed by the international design consultancy Interbrand. The company explained that its existing range of labels had become too complicated. The Queen of Clubs survived as its emblem, but the individual artists disappeared from the principal labels. I preferred the earlier bottles, particularly Pavlova’s Queen. Whatever the commercial advantages of the redesign, something rather enjoyable had been sacrificed.

Lehmann’s decision illustrates a problem for any winery considering an artistic commission today. Australian producers have spent considerable sums establishing the appearance of their wines, particularly those sold internationally. Changing a familiar label is expensive, while producing a limited edition brings its own printing, packaging and distribution costs. Even a winery proprietor with an impressive private art collection may be reluctant to interfere with a bottle that already sells perfectly well.

De Bortoli faces much the same commercial considerations as Peter Lehmann, having invested heavily in the presentation of its wines. Yet this major family-owned Australian producer has found room for Florence Broadhurst's decorative designs on selected releases. Her Japanese Floral appears on its Botrytis Semillon and Aubrey on Emeri Pink Moscato. Broadhurst's elaborate patterns look entirely at home on wine bottles, hardly surprising given that they were originally conceived for decorative use. They suffer none of the compromises that can accompany the reproduction of a complicated painting. I rather like them, and doubt that an original painting would have produced a better-looking bottle.

Yering Station, meanwhile, the historic Yarra Valley winery in Victoria, has supported contemporary Australian sculpture for more than two decades through its exhibitions and awards with Yarra Valley Arts. Its contribution has little to do with decorating bottles. There is considerable wealth in the Australian wine industry, and some of its proprietors are serious art collectors. If they would rather collect paintings or exhibit sculpture than put another picture on a bottle, who could blame them?

For all the attractions of collecting and exhibiting art, there is still something to be said for putting it on a bottle. Leeuwin has continued acquiring contemporary Australian paintings, although I find some of its recent choices questionable. Melbourne artist Lachlan Stonehouse’s Ripple was exhibited at Sydney Contemporary in 2024 before Leeuwin purchased it for its Art Series. Made with oil, linen and adhesive on artist board, the painting consists of a blue field arranged in roughly horizontal rows of small, irregular coloured squares.

I find Ripple disappointing. Stonehouse has constructed its surface with considerable care, and the variations in colour and texture are attractive enough. But there is remarkably little happening beneath them. The coloured marks seem almost interchangeable. Remove a dozen, rearrange several others, and I suspect the painting would lose very little.

The texture appears to reproduce reasonably well in the image I’ve seen, although I would want to examine the finished bottle before passing judgement on the label itself. My objection is principally to the painting. Its decorative qualities are obvious, but I find little reason to look at it for long. Olsen’s frogs, for all their apparent casualness, possess a vitality and humour that Ripple lacks. Leeuwin has acquired a pleasant enough image, but I would have expected a more adventurous choice.

Leeuwin is not the only winery still commissioning original art, although others have chosen rather different subjects. South Australia’s Hentley Farm commissions artists through its Creation Project. For its 2023 Shiraz, Daniel Connell painted portraits of winery employees, with individual portraits appearing on a limited release. They make an attractive series, and Connell’s interest in the human face offers a welcome change from the landscapes and decorative patterns familiar to Australian wine drinkers.

Unfortunately, Hentley Farm seems unwilling to leave the portraits alone. The employees portrayed are presented under titles such as The Alchemist and The Memory Maker, accompanied by promotional accounts of their roles at the winery. All this attention to the people and their contribution to the wine rather overshadows Connell's paintings. He is an accomplished portraitist, and the faces are interesting enough without the accompanying publicity.

The recent commissions demonstrate that Australian wineries can still produce interesting art labels, although Connell’s portraits are considerably more convincing than Stonehouse’s Ripple. The problem is hardly a shortage of capable artists. It is the assumption that putting a painting on a bottle is an achievement in itself. Australian wine already comes in some beautifully designed bottles. An artistic commission ought to give us something better, or at least something we wouldn't otherwise have seen.

Mouton Rothschild did considerably more than assemble an impressive collection of paintings. By commissioning a different artist for successive vintages, it made the labels themselves collectible. Leeuwin recognised the attraction, while Peter Lehmann achieved something similar with its Queen of Clubs. At their best, these commissions produced bottles worth keeping long after the wine had been drunk.

I doubt that today’s Australian painters are any less capable of producing memorable labels than Nolan, Boyd or Olsen. But I suspect the period when established wineries were prepared to commission artists year after year has passed. Leeuwin remains an exception, while Peter Lehmann’s abandoned series is a reminder of what we have lost.

There are understandable reasons for this reluctance. The wine industry has become far more sophisticated, and producers have invested heavily in labels they see little reason to change. Fair enough. The Horgans once had to persuade Sidney Nolan to put his painting on a bottle. These days, I suspect an Australian painter would have a harder time persuading a winery to take the same chance. More’s the pity.

Sources

Château Mouton Rothschild, The History and Art and the Label.

Leeuwin Estate, Art Gallery and Collection.

Adam Lechmere, ‘Lehmann Brings Out New Labels’, Decanter.

Anelia Pavlova, Wine Labels, artist’s website.

De Bortoli Wines, Florence Broadhurst Collection.

Yering Station, Yarra Valley Arts / Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition.

Lachlan Stonehouse, Leeuwin Estate Art Series, artist’s website.

Hentley Farm, The Creation Project and 2023 The Creation Shiraz.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

Divine Playhouse has been defended as irreverent, queer, inclusive and defiant. Its supporters speak of mischief, dissent and the freedom of artists to offend. None of this addresses the central fact. The sustained mockery of Catholic belief is being presented as art.

At its opening in Sydney, drag performers appeared dressed as nuns and a performer in a pig costume offered french fries as Holy Communion. An attendee wore the figure of Christ from a crucifix on a leather choker. Across its events and promotion, confession, exorcism, resurrection, sin and absolution became sexual jokes or nightclub decoration. One sacrament after another after another was given the same treatment.

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This is not criticism of the Catholic Church. Criticism would have something to say about doctrine, authority, abuse, hypocrisy or the treatment of gay people. Divine Playhouse has every right to take up those subjects, and there is no shortage of material. Instead, Catholic ritual is stripped of meaning and presented as something stupid, dirty or absurd. The sacraments are not examined or argued with. They are dragged out to be laughed at.

At what point does irreverence become contempt? Divine Playhouse has crossed that line. Its target is no longer merely the institutional Church or a set of contested teachings. The ridicule extends to how Catholics worship, what they believe and what they hold sacred.

Contempt does not have to take the form of a threat or a demand that Catholics be excluded. It can also be found in the determined presentation of their beliefs as filthy, foolish and fit only for amusement. When an entire venue builds its identity around that contempt, it can no longer be dismissed as a single bad joke.

Divine Playhouse opened on 8 July in the former St John the Evangelist church in Kent Street, Sydney. The building had been deconsecrated in 1932 and used as a theatre for about seventy years. It was not a functioning church and no congregation had been displaced, although the architecture and history were plainly central to the publicity.

The venue was supposed to provide an affordable home for independent music, theatre, comedy, drag and visual art. It was queer-led and presented as a place for artists who had few other places to perform. Sydney needs such venues, and there was nothing objectionable about that ambition.

The project had received $100,000 from Create NSW. Public money helped establish a venue whose identity depended heavily upon the mockery of Catholic rites. The organisers initially called it Unholy Playhouse before changing the name. The name changed, but the use of Catholic imagery did not.

Catholic and other Christian groups protested outside the opening. The landlord then issued a breach notice over “offensive trade” and terminated the lease. Within days the venue had closed, the artists had lost their bookings and Divine Playhouse had become a symbol of artistic freedom for much of Sydney’s arts community.

The closure was wrong. Religious protest should not have determined whether an arts venue remained open, however objectionable its program might have been. Divine Playhouse and its artists should have been left to face the judgement of an audience.

That judgement must include the possibility that what Divine Playhouse was doing was artistically worthless. Instead, the closure helped carry it into the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia before that question received much attention.

Under the title UNHOLY / DIVINE, more than fifty artists will appear across three nights. There will be an “Unholy Funeral” for the former venue, followed by events advertised through resurrection, confession, devotion, sin, vice and forbidden fruit. The same religious mockery that defined Divine Playhouse in Kent Street has now been made the basis of a program at the MCA.

We have not seen those three nights, and some of the individual performances may be good. But the organisers have already told us what they are proposing. Their titles, public statements, earlier performances and advertising give us a clear enough view of the idea being sold.

Almost everything that gives Divine Playhouse its force comes from Catholicism: the rituals, costumes, language, architecture and taboos, along with centuries of belief, beauty, guilt, fear, authority and suffering. It takes that inheritance, turns it upside down and mistakes the reversal for invention.

Communion becomes fast food. Nuns become drag costumes. Confession becomes sexual disclosure, while resurrection becomes the return of a nightclub. The audience recognises the reference, understands the insult and waits for the next one.

Nothing develops because there is nowhere for the idea to go. Once a sacrament has been replaced by a sexual or comic equivalent, the joke is finished and another sacrament must be brought out for the same treatment. Parody can expose hypocrisy, puncture authority or reveal something its subject would prefer to hide. Divine Playhouse exposes nothing. It has a target but no argument, and hostility is expected to do the work that imagination has not done.

Nor is any of this new. The drag nun, the sexualised crucifix, the mock Mass and the camp confessional have circulated through art, fashion, film and popular music for decades. Blasphemy can make powerful art when it tests belief or says something precise about religious power. Here the offence comes first, and everything else is arranged around it.

Divine Playhouse is completely dependent upon the religion it ridicules. Communion must remain sacred before offering french fries in its place can produce a reaction, and the nun’s habit must retain its meaning before it can function as a joke. Catholics must continue to believe and care or the performance collapses. Divine Playhouse borrows the seriousness of Catholicism without producing any seriousness of its own.

The Church’s treatment of gay people will be offered in reply. Christian institutions have caused great suffering, and the Catholic Church has much to answer for. Artists are entitled to address that history with all the anger it deserves.

Divine Playhouse is not a sustained attack on clerical abuse, Church authority or Catholic teaching on sexuality. It is a series of jokes about sacraments. Past injury may explain the hostility, but it cannot supply artistic merit where none is evident.

Camp offers no answer to that criticism. It can be sharp, knowing and merciless, but it can also be stale, lazy and pleased with itself. Putting on a nun’s habit does not relieve an artist of the need to have an idea.

The organisers have said they did not intend to mock Christianity, yet their promotion contradicts them. The references were chosen because people would recognise them and because some would be offended. If mockery was not intended, a remarkable amount of time has been spent designing it.

The MCA has not rescued Divine Playhouse from its artistic weakness. It has carried the same idea into Foundation Hall and placed the museum’s name behind it. Supporting artists displaced by the closure did not require the MCA to adopt the funeral, resurrection, confession and unholy branding of the original venue. It chose to continue the provocation.

Publicly funded art need not be polite or respectful of religion. It may be confronting, blasphemous and offensive. But Create NSW should still be able to explain why this idea deserved $100,000. Appeals to inclusion and creative freedom do not answer the charge that public money helped finance sustained contempt for Catholic belief.

Questioning that grant is not a demand that Divine Playhouse be banned. Its organisers may continue without public subsidy and present their ideas without being applauded by the MCA. Freedom of expression does not carry an entitlement to government money or institutional praise.

Much of the arts community has avoided the artistic question by concentrating on the closure. Once Divine Playhouse could present itself as a victim of censorship, the poverty of its idea became almost impolite to mention. The protests supplied the drama, the closure produced martyrs and the MCA provided the resurrection. A collection of exhausted anti-Catholic jokes acquired an importance it could never have earned on its own.

Divine Playhouse should have remained open and been judged for what it put before the public. Instead, its closure protected it from that judgement and allowed the MCA to turn it into a cause. Perhaps the October performances will prove richer than their promotion.

Almost everything Divine Playhouse draws on comes from Catholicism: the rituals, costumes, language, architecture and taboos, along with centuries of belief, beauty, guilt, fear, authority and suffering. It takes that inheritance, turns it upside down and mistakes the reversal for invention. The problem is not that it is offensive. It is that it is artistically lazy.

Andrew McIlroy is an Australian artist who writes about art, artists and the culture around them.

No. 2/2026

This edition brings together four current or forthcoming exhibitions. These concise previews and reviews consider the work presented, what succeeds and, where necessary, what does not.

SYDNEY

TONY ALBERT: REVERB
SULLIVAN+STRUMPF, Sydney
Until 17 OCTOBER 2026

Tony Albert has worked for years with old Aboriginalia, advertising, found photographs and the grotesque caricatures that once appeared on everything from ashtrays to tea towels. In Reverb, he brings Australian slang into the mix. Fair Dinkum, Stone the Crows, Fair Suck of the Sauce Bottle. They are funny phrases, which is partly the point. Albert knows how easily Australians use humour to get away with things.

He has always been blunt. That works because the pictures are never merely illustrations of an argument. They can be funny, handsome, crude and uncomfortable at once. In Reverb, the words sit alongside the old Aboriginalia without simply explaining it. What sounds knockabout and harmless starts to look rather less so once Albert gets hold of it.

Albert has been working with this material for a long time, but Reverb does not feel stale. The language gives the exhibition a different edge, and Albert knows exactly how far to push it.

SYDNEY

DAVID COLLINS: MANGROVE & KYLE MURRELL: ABOUT THE HOUSE
DEFIANCE GALLERY, Sydney
24 September - 17 OCTOBER 2026

David Collins’ Mangrove and Kyle Murrell’s About the House open at Defiance Gallery on 24 September. Collins has lived on the Hawkesbury since 1987 and has painted and drawn there for decades. He rows the river, works from its banks and knows its water, mangroves, boats, sheds and bush at close range. Yet the paintings have moved well beyond straightforward landscape. At times the river is only just recognisable beneath the colour and structure of the painting.

That long knowledge of one place is part of Collins’ strength. He is not relying on memory or on an idea of the Hawkesbury formed years ago; he is still out there looking. His recent exhibitions have also included paintings made inland and elsewhere, which is useful to remember. The river is central to his painting, but it does not account for all of it.

Murrell is a different proposition. He won both the John Olsen Prize for figure drawing and the Elioth Gruner Prize for landscape painting at the National Art School, and that command of drawing is still there even when the paintings become heavily worked. He has painted figures, interiors, objects and landscape, sometimes taking the image close to the point where it starts to disappear.

About the House gives Murrell a subject that could easily become slight: rooms, furniture, objects, corners of domestic life. I suspect he will make them less comfortable than that. With Murrell, the ordinary rarely stays ordinary for long.

They are very different painters. Collins has decades of looking behind him; Murrell is still capable of surprising you. For a few weeks, Defiance has both under the one roof, and this is one of those pairings worth seeing precisely because the paintings do not need to agree with each other.

SYDNEY

BILL HENSON
ROSLYN OXLEY9, Sydney
25 September - 17 October 2026

Bill Henson opens a new exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 on 25 September. He has shown with the gallery since 1990. More importantly, these are newly made photographs.

Henson has worked with darkness, suburbia, landscape, young figures and the outer edges of the city for decades. Few Australian photographers have made dusk and the edges of visibility so completely their own. The subjects recur, but repetition has never been the point. What matters is the tension Henson can still pull from familiar territory.

That makes the timing of this exhibition interesting. Henson has recently been dragged back into a familiar Australian argument after images of his were removed online and criticised largely in terms of their content. It is dispiriting to see an artist of his stature reduced once again to that argument rather than discussed as a photographer.

His last exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9, The Liquid Night in 2024, drew on photographs made in New York in 1989. This time the photographs are new. Fifty years into his career, that is reason enough to pay attention.

MELBOURNE

MABEL JULI WIRROONGOON: BIRTHPLACE, HOMELAND & DREAMTIME - SPRINGVALE STATION
NIAGARA GALLERIES, Melbourne - in association with Warmun Art Centre
Until 3 October 2026

Mabel Juli Wirroongoon’s Birthplace, Homeland & Dreamtime – Springvale Station is at Niagara Galleries until 3 October. All seventeen paintings were made in 2025. Springvale Station, Darrajayin, Kangaroo Dreaming and the Dreaming Hills dominate the exhibition, with Springvale Station at its centre. Juli was born there.

She is one of the senior Gija painters from Warmun. Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas encouraged her early on, and last year she received the Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement. The biography is considerable, but Juli herself puts things more plainly: “I’m doing my Country.” It is hard to improve on that.

Several paintings are titled Springvale – My Birthplace and Childhood Memories from My Ancestral Land. Others are of The Dreaming Hills & Goorlabal (Rainbow Serpent) Dreaming at Yarrunga. Juli paints with ochre and natural pigments from her country. There is no need to dress any of this up. The titles name the place, the stories are specific, and the material comes from there too.

The exhibition is deliberately concentrated. Seventeen paintings circle a small number of places and stories, and that repetition is central to the exhibition rather than a limitation. Juli keeps returning to Springvale Station, Darrajayin and the stories bound to them. By the end, the depth of that connection is unmistakable.

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Andrew

No. 3 / 2026

Readers of my recent essay Artists with Something More to Say might reasonably accuse me of hypocrisy for producing a newsletter devoted to exhibitions after poking fun at the weekly parade of supposedly unmissable shows. My quarrel was with indiscriminate praise, not the idea of recommending exhibitions. These five interest me for different reasons, and I see no contradiction in recommending an exhibition while reserving the right to find fault with it. Indeed, I rather hope readers sometimes expect me to.

Ben Crawford: The Colour of Dreams, the Shape of Memory

Boom Gallery, Geelong | 5 – 28 November 2026

Irish-born, Queensland-based painter Ben Crawford has little regard for the natural colours of a landscape. Rivers turn pink, trees burn orange and human figures are sometimes reduced to little more than marks among the vegetation. In The Colour of Dreams, the Shape of Memory, his forthcoming exhibition at Geelong’s Boom Gallery, he puts these liberties to good use.

Three paintings caught my eye, each placing the human figure in a quite different relationship with the landscape. In Untethered (2026), a resting figure rests on a boat, looking across a river towards three people adrift. A broad reflection of light separates them. In Salt on the Tongue, the boat is pushed into the distance, almost lost on an expanse of water framed by dark foliage. The Sting of the Dying Season is altogether more forceful, with a blazing canopy above a solitary figure bent among the undergrowth. Crawford’s paintings move between landscape and memory, with colour and the arrangement of forms doing as much as the recognisable subject to establish the character of each picture.

Crawford has also written eleven poems for the exhibition, which he is self-publishing in handmade chapbooks, each with an individually hand-painted cover. It is an enterprise that Wallace Berman, the American artist associated with the Californian Beats, might have appreciated. Between 1955 and 1964, Berman produced nine issues of Semina, his remarkable handmade publication combining poetry, photography and visual art, circulated largely among friends and fellow artists. I haven’t read the poems, but the prospect of a painter taking responsibility for both the writing and the physical object is appealing.

Whether Crawford’s poetry shares the imaginative freedom of his painting remains to be seen. The three pictures I’ve seen are reason enough to look forward to the exhibition, and the prospect of eleven handmade chapbooks makes the trip to Geelong all the more appealing.

Michael McHugh: Two Worlds

Martin Browne Contemporary, Paddington, Sydney | 1 – 24 October 2026

Michael McHugh’s botanical inventions have never been particularly obedient to nature. Plants sprout improbable appendages, marine organisms resemble exotic flowers and the whole lot is painted in colours that would give a botanist a headache. There is considerable skill behind this extravagance. McHugh’s appetite for intricate detail gives his compositions much of their richness, rewarding the viewer who takes the time to examine them closely. His new exhibition, Two Worlds, brings together paintings and, for the first time, hand-blown glass sculptures.

The paintings follow a 2025 residency at Château de Cerisay in France, where the winter landscape and the château’s moat provided an unlikely counterpart to Sydney’s Clovelly Beach. McHugh recalls the sensation of swimming beneath the surface at Clovelly, an experience that helps explain the peculiar mixture of botanical and marine forms in his paintings. Anyone expecting the French countryside to have moderated his appetite for colour will be disappointed. Bright Spark, Saturation Point and Chromasia are positively riotous, their surfaces packed with invented species, polka dots, stripes and patterns of almost microscopic intricacy. There is scarcely an inch of canvas left unoccupied, yet McHugh distinguishes one improbable specimen from another through changes of scale, colour and pattern. The pleasure is in discovering just how much he has managed to squeeze into a single picture.

McHugh’s new glass sculptures are every bit as extravagant as his paintings. The hand-blown vessels sprout tentacles, horns and peculiar bulbous appendages, their brilliant blues and greens recalling the marine organisms and imaginary plants that populate his canvases. Pacific and Pelagic have something of the extravagance of Venetian glass, while the spotted green Baublicious looks like a botanical specimen that has escaped from a particularly eccentric greenhouse. McHugh has transferred his familiar imagery into glass, but the change of material introduces transparency, reflected light and three-dimensional form into an imagination already unusually well supplied with extravagant possibilities.

Tiarnie Edwards: Accomplices

Martin Browne Contemporary, Paddington, Sydney | 1 – 24 October 2026

A dingo in a balaclava carrying a Molotov cocktail is not your usual piece of Australian wildlife art. Nor are kangaroos in streetwear or a gang of four squat characters dressed as superheroes. These are among the twenty ceramic sculptures in Accomplices, an exhibition by Tiarnie Edwards, a Ngarrindjeri artist raised on Nauo Country in South Australia. Edwards graduated from the University of South Australia in 2023 and has already assembled a wonderfully disreputable collection of native animals. Her sense of humour is wicked, although the references to Aboriginal resistance and Australia’s colonial history are anything but incidental.

Edwards builds her figures by hand, giving them ungainly proportions, exaggerated heads and rough, granular surfaces beneath their bright colours. In Live Laugh Light It Up, a masked dingo brandishes a flaming bottle, an unlikely advocate for the cheerful domestic philosophy suggested by the title. Elsewhere, four squat figures stand shoulder to shoulder in brightly coloured shirts, a superhero quartet unlikely to use their powers for the public good. The modelling is wonderfully assured in its apparent clumsiness. Oversized heads, stubby limbs and improbable accessories give these characters considerable personality, while their coarse surfaces preserve something of the pleasure Edwards evidently takes in handling clay.

Edwards draws freely upon comic books, popular culture and the history of Aboriginal resistance, without allowing the subject matter to overwhelm the sculptures. Her animals are too peculiar, too comical and too individual to serve merely as illustrations of political grievances. These are audacious sculptures from an artist who graduated only three years ago, and I suspect Accomplices will be one of the more entertaining exhibitions in Sydney this month.

Jane Burton: Nightwood

Bett Gallery, Hobart | 16 October – 7 November 2026

Jane Burton has spent much of her career photographing women in rooms where something appears to have gone terribly wrong. Her deserted houses, dimly lit interiors and shadowy landscapes owe something to the Gothic imagination, although the unease in her photographs is generally of her own making. In Nightwood 2 (2026), a naked woman sits beneath a bridal veil, her face concealed and her legs exposed. Behind her are glazed doors, dark foliage and an ornate pedestal. A network of fine cracks covers the image, giving it the appearance of an old painting whose surface has begun to deteriorate. It is an arresting photograph, with the theatrical arrangement of the figure held in check by the ordinary furnishings of the room.

The bridal veil is an obvious invitation to speculate about innocence, marriage and the exposure of the female body. Burton has made such interpretations almost too readily available, but the photograph has more to offer than its symbolism. The covered head almost disappears against the darkened glass, while the pale fabric falls across the woman’s body and spreads over the floor. There is something distinctly uncomfortable about the contrast between the ceremonial veil and the exposed flesh beneath it. Burton has arranged the scene with considerable precision, but she leaves the circumstances of the woman’s presence in the room entirely unexplained.

Nightwood is partly autobiographical, drawing upon Burton’s childhood memories and including photographs of a dead tree. There is little advance material available beyond this single photograph, but it provides ample reason to anticipate the exhibition. Burton has held some forty solo exhibitions, including her twenty-year survey Eye of the Beholder in 2009. If Nightwood 2 is representative of the new series, there should be plenty here to satisfy admirers of her particular brand of photographic theatre.

Glenn Morgan: Out From Under The Bed

Four Eight Four, Carlton, Melbourne | 8 – 17 October 2026

Glenn Morgan has made something of a career out of being a glorious nuisance. His paintings and sculptures are crowded with the peculiarities of Australian life, from suburban streets and country race meetings to political protests and the occasional national disgrace. His humour can be affectionate, vulgar or positively savage, depending on who has attracted his attention. The apparently unruly compositions are more carefully constructed than their cartoonish figures might suggest. Morgan has a considerable gift for organising chaos, and an equally impressive willingness to offend.

Recent paintings range from the everyday absurdities of Melbourne commute (2025) and Warrnambool May races (2024) to the more pointed political commentary of Stop seismic blasting (2024). He is quite capable of making his subjects ridiculous while treating their concerns seriously. His humour depends as much on his observation of human behaviour as on his considerable talent for exaggeration.

Morgan’s sculptures are no less outrageous than his paintings. His ingenious, sometimes mechanically operated constructions have the appearance of inventions assembled by someone with a mischievous disregard for conventional engineering. A finalist in the 2025 Maquette: Sculpture Award, Morgan was also selected for the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize with COVID Self portrait 2. Even a self-portrait can become an excuse for an argument with the world.

Morgan’s appearance at Four Eight Four in Carlton is something of a departure from his usual exhibitions with Australian Galleries. The gallery itself is easily overlooked, its unassuming exterior concealing an impressive stable of artists. It is worth seeking out in its own right. There is almost nothing available about Out From Under The Bed beyond a black-and-white promotional image depicting a congested city of crooked buildings, their windows scattered about with little regard for architectural convention. Has Morgan been hiding something, frightening himself or simply rummaging through the studio? Whatever has been lurking beneath the bed, he has apparently decided it is time the rest of us had a look.

A Plea to Galleries

Commercial galleries understandably concentrate their publicity on current exhibitions. Yet there is something to be said for giving forthcoming exhibitions a little more attention. A few advance photographs and some useful information can encourage independent criticism and introduce an artist to an audience well beyond the gallery’s regular clientele. The larger publications may have their own arrangements for obtaining advance material, but smaller independent publications can also bring serious attention to an exhibition. A good preview ought to benefit everyone, not least the artist. Although, depending on what the critic has to say, there are no guarantees.

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THIS ART LIFE I ANDREW MCILROY

Best wishes,

Andrew