News

Through the Margaret Olley Art Centre, the Tweed Regional Gallery offers a unique experience of Margaret Olley’s home studio, provide insight into Australian art history and practice, and honor the artist’s legacy of mentorship and patronage. The Nancy Fairfax Artist-In-Residence (AIR) studio program encourages arts practice and creative engagement between artist, community and place.

The AIR studio will extend and complete the re-creation of Margaret Olley’s home studio at Tweed Regional Gallery. Throughout her professional life, Margaret Olley supported many artists through mentorship and financial assistance. To Margaret, the most productive ways of supporting artists were to encourage the public exhibition of an artist’s practice and to encourage sales. It is widely known that Olley mentored a number of younger artists and encouraged their representation in public and private collections. She actively supported artists and advanced their careers through purchasing works for collections or offering artists the opportunity to further their development through fellowship programs.

The AIR studio program will offer artists an opportunity to stimulate their practice in a creative environment. The Gallery will administer and promote a program which will see at least two invited artists participate in funded residency programs at TRG annually. The artwork resulting from these residences will be included in the Gallery’s exhibition program and displayed in the Friends of the Gallery.

Marisa Purcell will take up the Residency in 2020.

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Marisa Purcell has been awarded a Kedewatan Residency in Ubud which she will take up later in 2019.

The Kedewatan Residency Program was established by artists as a space for professional contemporary artists, writers, curators, dancers to make work, while providing the opportunity to immerse themselves in the vibrant community of Ubud. The studio residency offers a private residence for both the research and creation of new work.

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Congratulations to Carbiene McDonald Tjangala, who has won the 2019 Hadley’s Art Prize, Australia’s richest landscape art award. Carbiene began painting only a year ago, yet his winning artwork, Four Dreamings, was chosen from more than 600 entries. The piece represents four Tjukurrpa (Dreamtime) stories passed down from his father and reflects his deep connection to Country.

The artist travelled for two days from the remote community of Papunya to Hobart—taking his first-ever flight—to accept the prestigious landscape art prize. His sister Karen, who translated for him, said he felt “really happy and grateful,” moved by the national recognition.

A member of a well-known Central Australian artistic family, McDonald Tjangala quickly became known for his dedication. Papunya art studio facilitator said the artist often paints from opening until closing time: “He’s often there before it opens and paints until we have to kick him out.”

Hadley’s Art Prize judge and MONA curator Jane Clark described Four Dreamings as “exciting and original” with a “universal quality.”

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IMAGE:

Carbiene McDonald Tjangala with his painting 'Four Dreamings' which won the Hadley's Art Prize, courtesy Jessica King.

John Bokor's work 'Spring' has been selected as a finalist in the National Still Life Award at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery.

Still is a biennial, acquisitive award for artworks in the genre of still life, in all mediums. The award is open to artists at all stages of their careers. Still: National Still Life Award seeks to highlight the diversity and vitality of still life in Australian contemporary art practice, broadening the interpretation and meaning of this enduring genre. The judge is Rebecca Coates, Director of the Shepparton Art Museum.

The Still exhibition official opening is on Saturday 21st September and is open until Saturday 16th November 2019.

IMAGE:
John Bokor
Spring 2019
oil on board
120 x 120 cm

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Jane Guthleben is a finalist in 2019 with her work The scratching post (self, artist).

The Award was established by the will of the late Florence Kate Geach in memory of her sister, Portia Geach. The non-acquisitive prize is awarded by the Trustee for the entry which is of the highest artistic merit, ‘…for the best portrait painted from life of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, or the Sciences by any female artist resident in Australia during the twelve months preceding the close date for entries.’

The 2019 exhibition will run from August 2 to September 15, 2019 at Sydney's S.H. Ervin Gallery.

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Un/Thaid, curated by Vipoo Srivilasa and featuring Bundit Puangthong has been reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald:

A new exhibition showcases the work of five Thai-born artists now living and working in Australia, the first of its kind in Melbourne. Curated by Vipoo Srivilasa, the show was designed to provide a platform, "for [the artists] to have a voice in Australia". An artist who moved to Australia 22 years ago, Srivilasa says when you emigrate, your cultural identity changes.

"All of them have a very strong sense of Thai culture in their work, yet it’s not traditional. It blends with Australian culture and becomes something new, something exciting."

- Kerrie O'Brien, Sydney Morning Herald

Un/Thaid runs until July 27 at Grau Projekt.

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UN/THAID Curated by Vipoo Srivilasa

This exhibition brings together the work of five contemporary artists from Thailand who now live and work in Australia. Arriving in Australia independently of one another across the 1990s and 2000s, these five artists are based in the urban centres of Melbourne and Sydney and have continued their distinct individual practices since arriving in this country. The work on display in this exhibition is a diverse offering, including performance, painting, ceramics, sculpture, video and installation. Articulating multi-dimensional and layered histories, all of these artists are emboldened in their shared cultural experience of growing up in Thailand and then relocating to Australia while continuing to develop and refine their artistic practices. This exhibition features the work of Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Nakarin Aaron Jaikla, Bundit Puangthong, Pimpisa Tinpalit and Somchai Charoen. A Thai born Melbourne based artist, Vipoo Srivilasa has initiated and organised this exhibition because of his desire to provide visibility and voice for Thai Contemporary artists who have been working and living in Australia.

The exhibition is open 13 June – 27 July, 2019

Grau Projekt, Melbourne

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Sarah Cox previews Stefan Dunlop's painting practice in the latest issue of Artist Profile magazine.

Dunlop contextualises his work in today’s world of ‘fake news’ and post-internet art by addressing the Western art tradition with irony. He adheres to a critical approach based on an aesthetic discourse that employs abstract art as a response to digital technology. His response to the chaos confronting us today is to go back to the old-school order of paint on canvas, using collage and fragmentation to evoke the digital milieu’s oversaturation of images.

Dunlop’s oeuvre has evolved from creating observational-based work and still lifes to figures in landscape. Early on, his work comprised monumental heroic figures painted in warm colours and bold gestural strokes. His recent work, in contrast, uses less structured, looser forms.

- Sarah Cox, Artist Profile, 2019

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The Muswellbrook Art Prize began in 1958 as the Festival of the Valley Art Prize and has grown to acquire an excellent collection of Australian artworks. These include modern and contemporary painting, works on paper, and ceramics from the Post War period and now the first two decades of the 21st Century. The Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection was created as a direct result of this ongoing acquisitive art competition.

John Bokor is a finalist in the 2019 prize.

IMAGE:
John Bokor
The Red Velvet Lounge 2018
oil on linen
68 x 91cm

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Christopher Zanko is a finalist in the 2019 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with his work 'Bulli: bricks and black diamonds' 2019.

The Wynne Prize is awarded annually for 'the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists’.

This open competition is judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Finalists are displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery (although in the early years all entrants were hung). Many winning paintings have become icons in Australian landscape art, entering the collections of public galleries, including our own.

The prize was established following a bequest by Richard Wynne, who died in 1895, and first awarded in 1897, in honour of the official opening of the Gallery at its present site.

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