• gallery listings
• exhibition profiles
• art services / resources
• subscribe
• stockists
• advertising
• about us
• contact us
• home

October 2006 Issue The October 2006 issue of Art Almanac is out now. Art Almanac is the essential guide to Australia's art galleries, listing the monthly exhibition schedules of over 550 Australian art galleries, packaged in an easy-to-use magazine. Art gallery exhibition listings are supported by gallery maps, an artist index, and profiles of current art exhibitions. Established in 1974 and published monthly Art Almanac is the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date Australian art gallery guide. The images and exhibitions below represent Art Almanac's editorial content. The editorial aims of Art Almanac's profiles are to provide images and information on current art exhibitions in Australia, highlighting the diversity, thought process's, issues, styles and techniques being portrayed by practising artists. Art Almanac, the essential guide to Australia's art galleries is available through an extensive network of retail outlets including all good Australian art galleries, art supply stores, bookshops and newsagents Australia wide, or via subscription.

Juan Davila Museum of Contemporary Art September 9 to November 12 Sydney Juan Davila features seminal works such as Davila’s epic 1980s murals, rarely seen Chilean pieces and new work created specifically for the show. This Chilean-born artist, who relocated to Australia in 1974, is a passionate advocate for art’s role to debate issues of social and political significance. Davila’s complex, beautiful and challenging paintings are known for their thorough interrogation of cultural, sexual and social identities, within an international context. Incorporating text, found objects, appropriated imagery, photography and other media, Davila’s paintings represent insightful critiques of themes including the Australian political system, the cultural aspects of late capitalism, the structures of the art world, and sexuality. This exhibition coincides with the publicatino of Juan Davila, a monograph by Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin, with writings by Juan Davila. Juan Davila, The Liberator Simon Bolivar, 1994, oil on canvas on metal, 125 x 98 cm

Lawrence Daws Paintings Robin Gibson Gallery October 7 to November 1 Sydney “Always present, no matter where he locates the physical geography of his art, is another landscape - the inner landscape of the unconscious mind. This is an uneasy terrain of fears, dreams and desires, where mysterious land forms combine with tiny running figures, monstrous pythons, gigantic birds and faceless female nudes, whose nakedness threatens as much as it seduces... They are places of exquisite beauty seen through a thin blue veil - a state half-way between waking and nightmare - that also contain an almost unbearable tension in which we sense that something terrible is about to happen but cannot explain why.” - Dr Candice Bruce, 2006 Lawrence Daws, Sunday Train, oil on canvas, 137 x 122cm

Del Kathryn Barton Kaliman Gallery October 6 to 28 Sydney Del Kathryn Barton, A is for........ (beauty before beauty), 2006, acrylic, gouache, watercolour, pen on polyester canvas, 220 x 180cm

Simon Blau, Sherna Teperson, Mishka Borowski Gallery 9 Through October Sydney Gallery 9’s inaugural exhibition features Haus Painting by Simon Blau, Fall Fast, Fall Free by Mishka Borowski and Snow Domes in The Age of Retreating Ice Caps by Sherna Teperson. Sherna Teperson, The air that we breathe (detail), 2006, high impact acrylic, ping-pong balls, found Disney toy, acrylic paint, watercolours, pencil crayon, silicon, plastic, MDF, aluminium, 165 x 91 x 73cm Photograph: Ian Hobbs

Justin O’Brien A Survey Exhibition 1938-1995 Philip Bacon Galleries October 3 to 28 Brisbane A contemporary of Jeffrey Smart and Margaret Olley, Justin O’Brien’s cultural legacy is considerable. Characterized by a flat palette of muted hues, O’Brien’s subject matter ranged from still life and portraiture to the religious imagery he was best known for, all mediated through his Australian perspective of Italian painting. A strict Catholic upbringing informed his religious oeuvre, although he later became agnostic. O’Brien was the inaugural winner of the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1951. Justin O’Brien, Three figures in Moonlight, 1993, oil on canvas, 68 x 49cm

Peter Day Survey: thirty something years of works on paper Marianne Newman Gallery October 7 to November 5 Sydney Thirty something works, representing thirty something shows over thirty something years... Day is especially well known for his intensely colourful works and his ground-breaking research into frescos on paper. Peter Day, Willcania, 2006, mineral silicate fresco on paper, 38 x 56cm

Anne France Fulgenge I’ve got a problem with the world today Michael Nagy Fine Art October 19 to November 11 Sydney This exhibition by French-born artist Anne-France Fulgence is inspired by a confronting and brutal encounter she experienced on a remote dirt track in the blistering outback near White Cliff. These powerful images marry the uneasy and destructive relationship between man and the Australian landscape. Originally introduced by early settlers for food, feral pigs are now a devastating force against the land, native wildlife and farmers. Guns, knives and ferocious dogs are used in an attempt to quell these beasts and the resultant ecological disaster. Anne France Fulgenge, Anytime anywhere, 2006, acrylic on plywood, 120 x 110cm

Jill Noble Recent Landscapes Eastgate & Holst October 11 to 31 Melbourne “I choose to explain the landscape in a simplified language. Some images use the horizon line from which a grided pattern sets the scene to hang flat forms and symbols in both real and imagined space. This inventive approach often results in a kind of flattening effect of the spatial plane. The landscape reduced to this simplified language of symbols and forms provides a narrative by which I invent my compositions and express the inspiration I always find in landscape.” - Jill Noble Jill Noble, Boulder Country Farm, 2006, oil on linen, 122.5 x 112.5cm

Stephen Haley Mesh: Paintings, Virtual Photographs and Projected Spaces Nellie Castan Gallery October 5 to 29 Melbourne Derived from 3D modelling software, using “Cartesian coordinates like the idealized projection of a colonizer’s dream,” Stephen Haley constructs his scenes using a web of interlocking lines, in effect, a mesh. These computer programs are evermore central to the design and building of our everyday environments - landscapes, architecture and objects - all begin as a mesh. The mesh is a model that makes manifest what is fundamental but often invisible or overlooked - the mesh of social interrelations and connections that at once sustain and restrain us. We live and regard the world through a mesh, a screen that mediates us and our experiences. Stephen Haley, Procession, 2006, oil on canvas, 150 x 183cm

Alan Jones The Human Show Legge Gallery October 17 to November 4 Sydney Alan Jones, Painting 41, 2006, oil on linen, 213.5 x 162cm

Philip Trusttum Hot Rods and William Bett Gallery Hobart at Depot Gallery October 5 to 14 Sydney Philip Trusttum, William and toy, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 206 x 182cm (canvas size)

Kate Daw The Between Space Art Gallery Western Australia June 18 to October 29 Western Australia Kate Daw’s recent work combines language and image, art and literature, evoking the fertile terrain of their interchange of meaning through objects (ceramic cups and saucers cast by the artist from various originals in her possession) and paintings (consisting of typed texts on bare canvas which she calls ‘voices’). The work is richly evocative of personal memory and feminised cultural experience and suggests multi-layered meanings. Kate Daw, The Between Space (cups and saucers), 2005, ceramic slip with glaze, table, dimensions variable

Lee Yong Deok Recent Sculpture Boutwell Draper Gallery September 27 to October 21 Sydney Lee Yong Deok, Walking on the street 0548, 2005, mixed media, 205 x 95 x 22cm

2006 Victorian Indigenous Art Award Mahoneys Gallery October 13 to 28 Melbourne This exhibition features the winning and shortlisted works of the 2006 Victorian Indigenous Art Award. “These awards celebrate, recognize and support Indigenous artists living and working in Victoria... The artists and their entries reflect the depth and diversity of the Indigenous arts sector in Victoria.” - Minister for the Arts, Mary Delahunty Sharon Nelson, Family Ties, 2006, acrylic with glitter paint on canvas

Hat Tricks! City Museum at Old Treasury September 30 to November 26 Melbourne Hat Tricks! plots a history of Melbourne from the first white settlement in 1835 to the present day, as told through its head wear. Showcasing hats from all periods and styles in a collision of lace, felt and ornament, Hat Tricks! includes a wide range of hats from present-day milliners. A feature work in the exhibition is Dream Hellscape by Melbourne milliner Naomi Tettmann. Inspired by nightmares, the installation is much more than a single ‘hat’ - the work envelopes an entire wall in a garish fusion of fetishistic red leather, beads and feathers. Naomi Tettmann, Dream Hellscape (detail), 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable

Hardware UTS Gallery September 12 to October 13 Sydney Hardware brings together six Sydney artists, Paul Donald, John Nicholson, Nuha Saad, Huseyin Sami, Mark Titmarsh and Mimi Tong, working in the junction between sculpture and painting. These artists consider the relationship between the physical matter that forms a work and the ‘matter’ or idea that informs it. Hardware investigates the role of materiality in the process of art making and tests the limits of what can be called painting. Nuha Saad, Model Scape (detail), 2006, acrylic on wood, 240 x 180 x 10cm

Pam Aitken Milan to Marrickville Factory 49 September 27 to October 7 Sydney This work is based on starting points gathered from a recent Milan Studio Residency (Aust Council for the Arts). In Milan, buildings were often under renovation; the windows and walls covered with a very light white material. The result of this investigation is a painting installation consisting of 9 large white interlocking paintings. Light, combined with the consideration of architecture and minimal ways to pursue ideas, strongly influence the work. An investigation into the most simple drawing (a straight line) continues into the grid, and this leads the viewer into infinity. Pam Aitken, untitled (detail), from the series Milan scaffolding, 2004, 21.7 x 16.3cm

Rapt! Various venues Melbourne and Sydney Through October and November Rapt! is an ambitious program of exhibitions, residencies and public events showcasing contemporary Japanese art in Australia. The exhibitions are at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Kings ARI, Monash University Museum of Art, Object Gallery, RMIT Project Space, Seventh Gallery Inc, Spacement and West Space Inc. Shiro Takatani, Camera Lucida, 2006, installation detail, mixed media, dimensions variable Showing at West Space - Melbourne.

John Citizen Sutton Gallery September 23 to October 18 Melbourne “In the work of John Citizen we see Gordon Bennett playing with the rhetoric of identity, shifting his style, as a strategy to avoid a typecast and to emphasise he is above all an artist, a performer.” - Ian McLean, Who is john citizen?, 2006 John Citizen, Interior (Green Lounge Suite), 2006, acrylic on linen, 152 x 152cm

Take a look at other exhibition profiles in our current issue or browse through previous issues.