What’s Happening in the Artworld in Asia Pacific :: 2008 :: 2009
Australia
Home at last :: National Gallery of Australia
13 September 2008 – 1 February 2009 | Children’s Gallery
Visit an exhibition that is just like home. In the Children’s Gallery at the National Gallery of Australia, the exhibition Home at last features prints, drawings, photographs and decorative arts by Australian and Aboriginal artists from the national collection. Adults and children will enjoy sharing stories of Australian homes. Explore household objects, toys, indoor and outdoor spaces and family life. The exhibition links art making and the home as it demonstrates that works of art are often inspired by the artist’s home environment. Visitors will also have the opportunity to respond to works in the exhibition by drawing and building.
Gordon Bennett :: A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition
10 May to 3 August 2008 at the Queensland Art Gallery
December 2008 to February 2009 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia
Since his first major solo exhibition in 1989, Gordon Bennett has achieved international critical acclaim for the complex ways in which his work engages with historical and contemporary questions of cultural and personal identity, with a specific focus on Australia’s colonial past and its postcolonial present. Bennett’s idiosyncratic art is founded on his critical enquiry into the power and effects of language to structure ideologies, and social and cultural systems. His work has been guided by a postmodernist aesthetic that has enabled him to deconstruct and represent the histories and politics that determine identities and the national and international social landscapes in which, through his work, he seeks to locate a place for himself.
The exhibition will present twenty years of the artist’s work and will bring together many of the Notes to Basquiat paintings and selected works from the Home Décor series. The exhibition will examine the manner in which Bennett’s focus on the disenfranchisement of colonialism resonates globally beyond his specifically Australian context, and the challenge his work makes to political conservatism and social complacency.
