The National 2019: new Australian art
Exhibition starts: 29 March and runs until 21 July 2019
The second of three biennial surveys presenting the latest ideas and forms in contemporary Australian art
Staged concurrently at three of Sydney’s premiere cultural institutions – the Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
The National 2019: new Australian art showcases a total of 65 emerging, mid-career and established Australian artists living across the country and overseas and working in a diverse range of media.
The exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW presents 24 artists who navigate the boundary between chaos and control in work that is by turns political, poetic and personal.
It reveals how Australian artists are responding with subtlety and ambition to the times they live in, through artworks that are intricate, complex and often charged with a sense of precariousness.
QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY (QAGOMA)
ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIEL UNTIL 28 APRIL 2019
Lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar
The hugely ambitious APT series brings significant art from across the Asia Pacific to Brisbane. Overflowing with colour and life, this free contemporary art exhibition presents a unique mix of creativity and cross-cultural insight.
Discover more than 400 artworks by over 80 individuals, collectives and groups that capture the energy of new art being created in Asia, the Pacific and Australia.
Alongside the exhibition are 3 thought-provoking film programs, 8 hands on activities for kids and 5 months of ongoing programs and special events, including daily guided tours.
NATIONAL GALLERY VICTORIA (NGV)
VISIONS OF PARADISE / INDIAN COURT PAINTING
Until 28 April 2019
The exhibition…’presents the NGV’s internationally important holdings of Indian court paintings and takes exhibition visitors on a journey to the opulent palaces, sumptuous lifestyles and cultural activities of the famed Indian Maharaja and Maharana of Rajasthan.
The exhibition features a selection of works from a major 1980 Felton Bequest acquisition of over 270 paintings that document the princely lifestyles of the Rajput courts of Bikaner, Marwar (Jodhpur), Jaipur, Kotar and Mewar (Udaipur).
These seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings produced with rich gem-like pigments, an astounding attention to detail and unconventional approaches to perspective create visually complex and sophisticated scenes that have become internationally celebrated and quintessentially associated with Indian culture and India’s visual identity.
QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY (QAGOMA)
INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN ART COLLECTION
NAMATJIRA STORY
Albert Namatjira (1902–59) was a Western Arrernte-speaking artist from the MacDonnell Ranges, west of Alice Springs in Central Australia. His Western-style landscapes, different from traditional Aboriginal art, made him a celebrated pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in the 1950s and the most famous Indigenous Australian of his generation.
A skilled artist and a proud Arrernte (Aranda) elder, Namatjira continues to inspire. A school of painting has formed around him, and many artists have been compelled to tell his story through their own works.
This display features early works by Namatjira , arguably Australia’s best-known Aboriginal artist, alongside artworks by those he influenced, including artists from the Arrernte landscape painting tradition, the Hermannsburg Potters and his great-grandson, Vincent Namatjira.
ART GALLERY SOUTH AUSTRALIA (AGSA)
QUILTY
UNTIL 2 JUNE 2019
THE FIRST MAJOR SURVEY EXHIBITION OF ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST ACCLAIMED CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS.
The Art Gallery of South Australia presents the first major survey exhibition of one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Ben Quilty.
The exhibition extends from Quilty’s early reflections on the initiation rituals performed by young Australian men to his experience as an official war artist in Afghanistan and his campaign to save the lives of Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. The exhibition also includes works inspired by Quilty’s visits with author Richard Flanagan to Lebanon, Lesbos and Serbia, his revisions of the Australian landscape, and raw, intimate portraits of himself, his family and his friends.
My work is about working out how to live in this world, it’s about compassion and empathy but also anger and resistance. Through it I hope to push compassion to the front of national debate.
Additional note:
Fairy Bower Rorschach (2012) captures the New South Wales tourist attraction Fairy Bower Falls, which is also thought to be the site of a horrific massacre of Aboriginal people.
