Connecting you with Australian culture online
Barbara Tucker, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, Hurstbridge, c. The Angry Penguin painters are considered to be the major figures of a modernist movement in Australian art, based in Melbourne, which has determined and shaped Australian conte...
John Glover (1767-1849), Australian landscape with cattle: the artist's property Patterdale , c. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia: an2253188. The Heidelberg School was the first significant art movement in Australia. ...
Russell Drysdale, Picture of Donald Friend, 1948. Hill End, a gold-rush town, 85km north of Bathurst in central New South Wales (NSW) is a sacred site in both NSW and also Australian art history. These artists include: John Olsen, Margaret Olley, Jeffre...
The bush has an iconic status in Australian life and features strongly in any debate about national identity, especially as expressed in Australian literature, painting, popular music, films and foods. The bush was revered as a source of national ideals b...
Employing dream imagery, poetry and precarious juxtapositions, Australian artists in the 1930s and early 1940s responded to European surrealists and were part of an international surrealist movement - 'in all its clarity'. Many of Australia's best known a...
These painters, amongst them Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder, were known by this name because of the artists' camps they shared in areas around Melbourne, including Heidelberg. Artists such as A J Daplyn, A H Fullwood, ...
Works by many contemporary visual artists in Western Australia demonstrate a vital consciousness of the land. Western Australian art traces a presence on the land, a cultural loss and, ultimately, a belief in the future. Contemporary artists such as pai...
Today, the term refers to a number of artists, including Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who painted scenes 'en plein air' (in the open air) of Australia, particularly in Melbourne and its surrounds. Over the years they were joined b...
Centred around poet Max Harris, the movement took their name from an art and literary magazine first published by Harris in 1940. The Angry Penguins, to quote Max Harris, expressed 'a noisy and aggressive revolutionary modernism' and represented the new l...
Winner of the 2008 Archibald Prize. Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. An exhibition of the paintings shortlisted for judging, in conjunction with those shortlisted for the Wynne Prize and the Sulman Prize, is held at the Art Gallery o...
Brett Whiteley is one of Australia's most revered artists. He won many prizes and awards and his work hangs in numerous galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New Yor...
Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) was a leading Sydney painter in the Australian modernist movement, and her painting The Sock Knitter (1915) is generally regarded as Australia's first modernist work. Grace Cossington Smith, The Bridge in-Curve, c.1930, ...
Bark Painting, Evans Collection, Northern Territory Library. Image courtesy of the Northern Territory Library and the National Library of Australia. Australian Indigenous art is the oldest ongoing tradition of art in the world. ...
Margaret Preston was an Australian painter and printmaker who was a leading example of early Australian modernism. Her essays and articles were published in Australian journals including Art in Australia , Undergrowth, Jindyworobak Review and Australia N...
By the 1930s, modern style flourished in retail, entertainment, pubs, milk bars, modern swimming pools and fashion. Australia’s reception to modernism is a complex story of spasmodic cultural transformation led by avant-garde experiments and the cr...
Winner of the 2007 Portia Geach Award. The Portia Geach Memorial Award is recognised as one of the most important celebrations of the talents and creativity of Australian female portrait painters. Winner of the 1992 Portia Geach Award. ...
The art of Margaret Olley is the art of deliberate choices. Olley's art teacher at Somerville House persuaded Olley's parents to send Margaret to art school. Margaret Olley is represented at the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the...
Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and Harry Seidler have contributed significantly to modern Australian architecture by applying modernist-style principles to Australian homes. Another group of architects, such as Glenn Murcutt, Tina Engelen and Ian Moore, and Trop...
Art forms such as dance, theatre, writing, music and the visual arts draw on the creativity and interests of Australians of many abilities. The Australia Council, Arts Access Australia, [formerly Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts (DADAA)] ...
The bark petitions were the first to use traditional forms and combine bark painting with text typed on paper. Robyn MacDonald, Petition to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd by Galarrwuy Yunupingu from Yirrkala, Northern Territory, 23 July, 2008. In July 2008, Yu...
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