Charles Green

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  previews January 2020

  22nd Biennale of Sydney: “NIRIN”

  Curated by Brook Andrew

  Artist Brook Andrew called the 2017 midcareer survey of his work “The Right to Offend Is Sacred,” its title an in-your-face sentiment likely to echo across his edition of the Biennale of Sydney titled “NIRIN,” meaning edge in the Wiradjuri language of his mother’s people. The work of First Nations and activist artists is at the heart of this exhibition, from Stone Kulimoe’anga Maka’s smoke-on-canvas pieces to Kunmanara Williams’s sprawling, showstopping paintings scrawled across mailbags and suspended from traditional spears. This exhibition will also focus on artist

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  print September 2019

  Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley

  Since the early 1980s, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley—working mostly collaboratively, at times independently—have made memory modern with such a determinedly light touch that their combinations of text, objects, and installations invoke several worlds at once, among them modernist design, art-house cinema, biomorphic sculpture, biology, anthropology, autobiography, and feminist art. They navigate these realms in such a way that none alone dominates. And their material inventory is equally disparate, taking in wood, colored acrylic, molded ply, resin, cast bronze, perforated aluminum, steel,

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  previews September 2017

  “HYPER REAL”

  Since the late 1960s, sculptors around the world, including John De Andrea and Duane Hanson, have been creating eerily lifelike simulacra of human bodies, first through traditional techniques of modeling, casting, and the careful application of paint, and later by learning from the film industry’s special-effects fabricators in order to generate utterly fantastic, often digitally assisted visions of alternative realities. Featuring a provocatively diverse assortment of practices, this traveling exhibition tracks developments in hyperrealism over the past

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  print May 2017

  Patricia Piccinini

  Two decades ago, model making commanded considerable attention in the art world. Patricia Piccinini, along with Ron Mueck, Ricky Swallow, Sam Durant, and many others, went further than just making to-scale, postmodern simulacra of consumer objects and cardboard boxes. Each of them constructed labor-intensive, trompe l’oeil models of scenes or characters from imaginary worlds in place of the archiving and documenting that in other artists’ hands became the more familiar hallmark of contemporary art. Their painfully perfect works, marked by a spectacular degree of skill and effort, teetered on

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  print December 2016

  Gareth Sansom

  Gareth Sansom’s extraordinarily eccentric paintings are composed of overpainted and underpainted images—palimpsests of body parts, numerals, words, cartoonish faces, collaged photographs, and feces-like smears. As they sprawl toward their edges, these agglomerations are beaten back by borders of precisely painted, brightly colored abstractions that look at first sight as if they’ve been carelessly assembled from a late-1960s mail-order catalogue of modernism’s formalist tricks. That’s exactly when Sansom started making paintings like this, which have earned him his position as one of

• previews May 2015

  “Robert MacPherson: The Painter’s Reach”

  Since the 1970s, Brisbane-based artist Robert MacPherson has produced a diverse set of works that critically engage the materiality of painting, often employing a vernacular of the quotidian: Objects such as road signs, paintbrushes, shoes, and office stationery proliferate throughout his oeuvre. Over the years, critics and curators have cast MacPherson as an exemplar of Minimalism, abstraction, the archival impulse, and Conceptualism, but the meaning of his works has remained elusive. Perhaps answers will be found in “The Painter’s Reach,” MacPherson’s first major museum

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  print January 2015

  “Benglis 73/74”

  Everyone who attended art-school theory seminars from the mid-1970s on, and everyone who reads Artforum, knows that in 1974, New York artist Lynda Benglis’s gallery purchased two pages of ad space in the magazine’s November issue. That advertisement is the basis for the recent three-gallery exhibition “Benglis 73/74.” Its curator, Geoff Newton, is an artist with a taste for the textual (he sometimes paints covers of art books or magazines). For this show, he assembled works by a long list of British and American artists, from Sarah Lucas and Cosey Fanni Tutti to Robert Mapplethorpe and Benglis

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  print December 2012

  TarraWarra Biennial 2012

  For this carefully modest and constantly thoughtful biennial, titled “Sonic Spheres,” a focus on sound art means more than audio booths and noise spill. Exhibited work by twenty individual artists and one collaboration includes scores, drawings on top of scores, aural reinterpretations, and invented musical instruments. Indicating the conflicted and coveted currency of contemporary sound art, catalogue essayist and Sydney-based sound theorist Caleb Kelly disputes the terms of the art world’s current preoccupation with sound art altogether, questioning the very value of such a category and noting

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  print February 2012

  Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano

  Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano are identical twins. This is not at all incidental to the hypnotic charisma of their videos, which have in the past often been documentations of joint actions. Among these is if . . . so . . . then, 2006, in which the artists, seated face-to-face, reach past each other and draw in unison. Their sheer physical similarity, calligraphic gestures, and muteness—plus the simple documentary cinematography—produce the overwhelming sense of a single artist doubled. Many of these videos were filmed in austere black and white. Indoors or outdoors, against

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  previews May 2010

  17th Biennale of Sydney

  Veteran curator David Elliott disperses the Biennale of Sydney across several harbor-area locations, including the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the glorious Cockatoo Island.

  Veteran curator David Elliott disperses the Biennale of Sydney across several harbor-area locations, including the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the glorious Cockatoo Island, where disused industrial buildings and a former prison play host to a massive light-box installation by Hiroshi Sugimoto and the Tiger Lillies’ new “post-punk neo-Brechtian” opera, among other contributions by some fifty international artists. Ransacking both the recent past and the haunted present, Elliott has selected works with maximum iconic presence and acute historical

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  print November 2009

  Len Lye

  In 1961 Len Lye wrote, “In tangible sculpture the aesthetic value of objects becomes secondary to that of their motion.” This just about sums up the message of this revelatory exhibition, almost entirely gathered from the encyclopedic holdings of the Len Lye Foundation at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Zealand’s most important museum of contemporary art), which, along with the New Zealand Film Archive, was given Lye’s work upon his death in 1980. Densely researched and beautifully installed by curators Alessio Cavallaro and Tyler Cann, this is the first comprehensive overview of one of

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  previews May 2009

  Tacita Dean

  Tacita Dean’s gorgeous documentations of the obsolete using recently outmoded media (she shoots in 16 mm) track the passing of the twentieth century. This survey—her first substantial Australian showing since 2001—will take into account the nostalgic trajectory of her recent output.

  Tacita Dean’s gorgeous documentations of the obsolete using recently outmoded media (she shoots in 16 mm) track the passing of the twentieth century. This survey—her first substantial Australian showing since 2001—will take into account the nostalgic trajectory of her recent output, including Kodak, 2006, a film portraying one of the last analog film factories in Europe, now limited to manufacturing X-ray material, and her luminous celluloid portrait of Merce Cunningham performing to John Cage’s 4'33", a dance that premiered last summer at upstate New York’s Dia:Beacon.