The Basil Sellers is an annual prize for sport-themed art - bridging the divide. My favourites were both surfing-related (praps indicative of the fact that I like the colour blue) in William Mackinnon's "The Break" and Narelle Autio's surf-lifesaving series; also a loving rendition of "The underarm bowling incident of 1981" (Noel McKenna), even if it did somewhat resemble a high school poster project!
While "The less there is to see the more important it is to look" collected various Australian abstract pieces from the second half of the 20th C, taking as its starting point a question about whether the narrative of abstraction developing in two streams (Cezanne and Seurat - cubism - geometric and constructivist abstraction / Gauguin - the fauves - Kandinsky - surrealism - abstract expressionism) really holds, or at least continues to hold, into the fragmentation of artistic streams in more recent years. "Is abstraction more than a formalist exercise?" Well of course it is. I have to say, my favourites were the three relatively early pieces at the very start, which were intended to provide context for the recent - John Passmore ("Snow", 1946), Ralph Balson ("Untitled", 1954) and Robert Grieve ("Composition", 1966).
(w/ Trang)
While "The less there is to see the more important it is to look" collected various Australian abstract pieces from the second half of the 20th C, taking as its starting point a question about whether the narrative of abstraction developing in two streams (Cezanne and Seurat - cubism - geometric and constructivist abstraction / Gauguin - the fauves - Kandinsky - surrealism - abstract expressionism) really holds, or at least continues to hold, into the fragmentation of artistic streams in more recent years. "Is abstraction more than a formalist exercise?" Well of course it is. I have to say, my favourites were the three relatively early pieces at the very start, which were intended to provide context for the recent - John Passmore ("Snow", 1946), Ralph Balson ("Untitled", 1954) and Robert Grieve ("Composition", 1966).
(w/ Trang)
