At Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong, the centrepiece of Juan Ford's recent solo exhibition Blank(15 March–20 April 2019) was Recollector (2018), a hyper-realistic portrait of a solo female figure standing against a clear blue sky, the painting cropped at her knee. She is costumed in white drapery, although fragments of red, blue, and yellow under her...

Vincent Namatjira relishes painting famous people who are humorously redeployed across vivid canvases and depicted in his community in remote Indulkana in South Australia. His powerful paintings are part portraiture and part caricature, in which politicians are placed side by side in wryly preposterous juxtapositions, such as Donald Trump and Kim...

As far as art fair venues go, Sydney Contemporary (13–16 September 2018) has nailed it with Carriageworks, where the fair was once again staged. Formerly a rail yard and now a cultural centre, the space has retained its distinctive 19th-century industrial details, and it offered a striking light-filled backdrop to the fair's crisp white booths, the...

'With a thriving contemporary art scene, Sydney is a dynamic cultural destination with an international reputation for presenting the very best in visual art through its leading commercial galleries, public institutions, private museums, festivals and Biennale. Defined by the vibrancy of its host city, Sydney Contemporary provides collectors,...

Melbourne Art Week returns to much fanfare this year, taking place between 30 July and 5 August 2018 with the biennial Melbourne Art Fair holding centre stage after its hiatus in 2016 (2–5 August 2018). Situated across two venues within the Southbank Arts Precinct and presenting 40 new and established galleries from Australia, New Zealand and...

On Monday night of Hong Kong's art week, the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, who call themselves the 'conscience of the art world', addressed a packed lecture theatre at the University of Hong Kong—their first public appearance in Asia. Armed with signature stats, facts, and bananas, three gorilla-masked members of the group, which...

Chris Bond is well known for his exquisite paintings that look like books. Playing with concepts of authenticity and identity, his work involves the invention and embodiment of fictional artists, writers, organisations and scenarios that assist with the creative act. These inventions are presented as painted facsimiles of imagined books,...

Art Basel Hong Kong has started early this year. I don’t mean just the dates, which have been pushed forward from May to March. I mean inboxes are already flooded with invitations for previews and dinners taking place well ahead of the March 22 VIP preview. There are more events, more exhibitions, and certainly more collectors descending...

Michael Cook is a Brisbane-based photomedia artist of Bidjara heritage who has forged an international reputation as an artist with a significant vision. His photographic series, Majority Rule was a stand out success at the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire, 2014. In 2015 his work was exhibited in Personal Structures...

Bold, painterly and conceptually rich, Vincent Namatjira's work has gained significant recognition in Australia and abroad. In 2015, his work was curated into the 10th Mildura Palimpsest Biennale, and Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where he exhibited a series of...

Having held the dual role of co-directors of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) for almost two years, Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh have shaken up the city’s contemporary art landscape. The unprecedented formulation of a joint vocation of director and curator shared between two people saw two outsiders hailing from Canada and...

Since the late 1980s the major concern for curatorial practice has been the rise of biennale culture; the impact this exhibition format has had upon both the production and reception of contemporary art internationally. Reflecting on this lineage and recent politics from within the Asia-Pacific region, it is apparent that exhibitions such as the...

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."George Bernard ShawIn 1879, a French postman named Ferdinand Cheval began building an esoteric homage to the beauty of sandstone. On one of his postal rounds, Cheval came across small pieces of the...

Dianne Tanzer established her gallery, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects in Melbourne, Australia in 1990. Established as an exciting platform for Australian contemporary art, it continues to deliver a robust exhibition program. This year the gallery is undergoing a significant shift as it joins forces with another Melbourne stalwart, Helen Gory...