VAULT EXTRA 21 September 2023
MOSMAN ART GALLERY
The Mosman Art Prize
The annual exhibition of Mosman Art Prize finalists opens this weekend. The longest running municipal art prize in Australia, includes amongst its previous winners, whose works go on to form the basis of the Mosman Art Collection, Grace Cossington Smith, Cressida Campbell, Guan Wei and Michael Zavros. This year’s finalists were selected by Archibald Prize-winning artist Fiona Lowry. 92 artist’s work, from close to 1300 entries, will be on display until the end of October.
23 September – 29 October
Image credit: Mosman Art Prize 2022. Photo: Jacquie Manning
FINE ARTS, SYDNEY
Sydney Scallop
The first solo exhibition of Francis Upritchard’s work with Fine Arts, Sydney opened recently, titled Sydney Scallop. It brings together a collection of new and recent sculptures that range across ancient and modern-inspired figures, vessels, urns and creatures that are modelled, cast and painted. An artist who draws on figurative sculpture, craft traditions, literature and history and walks the line of realism and fantasy, Upritchard employs materials including bronze, glass, ceramic, thermoplastic, shibuichi and bone. The artist’s uncanny, amorphous characters and artefacts travel out from the histories and mythologies of her idiosyncratic mini-worlds to reveal much about human nature in our own.
Until 28 October, 2023
Image credit: Francis Upritchard, Sydney Scallop, Installation view, Fine Arts, Sydney, 1 September – 28 October, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney
YAVUZ GALLERY
Desert Songs
In October, Yavuz Gallery will present a major debut exhibition by Western Aranda artist Vincent Namatjira OAM to coincide with a forthcoming monograph by Thames and Hudson and a major survey at the Art the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2023 and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in 2024. Desert Songs will feature thirteen new paintings, including celebrated works Vincent and Vincent, Charles on Country and Desert Songs (Albert Namatjira). Namatjira’s subversive portraits interrogate complex colonial narratives from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective with wit, heart and keen observation of Australian and international politics. He presents hard, brutal stories from his personal and familial histories unapologetically, but with a cheeky humour that allows himself and invites his viewers to step into the shoes of others whose lives have been shaped by Australia’s relationship with the Empire.
5 – 28 October 2023
Image credit: Vincent Namatjira, The Royal Tour (Vincent and Elizabeth riding), 2023, acrylic on found vintage poster, 90 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Iwantja Arts and Yavuz Gallery
IMMIGRATION MUSEUM
Fam by Where are you from
Supported by a City of Melbourne Activation Grant, Fam by Where are you from? brings together 15 stories in an exhibition that documents the complexities of familial relationships, specifically to do with identity, and seeks to redefine the conventional so-called Australian family portrait. The curator of the project, Sabina McKenna, wanted to address the dissonance surrounding the idea of the family unit in Australian discourse. The project, more than five years in the making and always intended to find its home at the Immigration Museum, considers conversations about different experiences and how to talk about race within a family and hopefully highlight and dissipate shame within families where these conversations are happening.
Until 24 January 2024
Image credit: Fam by Where are you from?, Installation View, Immigration Museum, Melbourne, 2023. Photo: Eugene Hyland. Courtesy Museums Victoria
TARRAWARRA MUSEUM OF ART
The Soils Project
Thirteen practitioners and collectives from Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia explore the complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation in TarraWarra Museum of Art’s The Soils Project. The exhibition emerged from an ongoing research-based experimental project that was developed with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Each participant in The Soils Project contributed their understanding of soil as both matter and metaphor to the specific and situated practices that collectively, as The Soils Project, embrace the deep histories of a multiplicity of landscapes and environments.
Until 12 November 2023
Image credit: D Harding, As I remember it, 2022, painting on skylight glass, installation view, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway. Photo: Thor Brødreskift. Courtesy the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
ARNDT ART AGENCY
Our Country: APY Lands
Ngura, meaning ‘earth, country, home’ in the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara languages, is the central concept of Our Country: APY Lands at GNYP Gallery, Berlin, reflecting its significance to the Aṉangu people of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, a sparsely populated desert region in the north of the Australian state of South Australia. The exhibition of APY Art Centre Collective and Mimili Maku Arts artists, in collaboration with Arndt Art Agency, consists of vibrantly colourful paintings that both continue an ancient artistic tradition and give voice to Aboriginal rights issues of governance, sustainable land management and the protection of sacred sites. The exhibition, as part of Berlin Art Week 2023, includes artists Kukika Adamson, Nyunmiti Burton, Tuppy Goodwin, Yaritji Heffernan, Sandra Pumani, Rhoda Tjitayi and the Umoona Collaborative.
14 September – 7 October 2023
Image credit: Installation view, Our Country: APY Lands, GNYP Gallery, Berlin, 14 September – 3 November, 2023. Photo credit: Ludger Paffrath. Courtesy APY Art Centre Collective and Mimili Maku Arts artists, in collaboration with Arndt Art Agency (A3) (Berlin/Melbourne)
