‘SPRING’ featuring Sally Anderson, Jake Walker, Joanna Logue, Miranda Skoczek, Tim McMonagle, Pia Murphy, Rhys Lee

We are delighted to share that Sally Anderson's painting ‘Middle Brother Mother Mountain Fountain (PP Nude in a Garden, BT Mother and Child)’ is a finalist in the Calleen Art Award.

The Calleen Art Award is an annual acquisitive painting prize and exhibition. It presents the best of contemporary Australian painting in any style, theme or subject. Since its inception in 1977 by Cowra Art Patron Mrs Patricia Fagan OAM the Calleen Art Award has celebrated contemporary art practices and fostered originality, creativity and excellence in the visual arts.The winning artwork will join the Calleen Collection at Cowra Regional Art Gallery collection.

READ MORE HERE

IMAGE:
SALLY ANDERSON
‘Middle Brother Mother Mountain Fountain (PP Nude in a Garden, BT Mother and Child)’ 2024
acrylic on polycotton
183 x 197cm

We are thrilled to announce that Sally Anderson’s work is a finalists in the Gosford Art Prize, with her work ‘November bells, BT mother, birth banksias, PP nude in a garden’.

The Gosford Art Prize will be presented at Gosford Regional Gallery and is open to all artists across Australia. It attracts entries in all mediums from traditional forms to new media artworks. The 2025 iteration is the 26th time the prize will be presented at Gosford Regional Gallery, and it continues to grow in size and popularity every year.

The finalists exhibition is on until 9 November, 2025 at Gosford Regional Gallery.

READ MORE HERE

IMAGE:
SALLY ANDERSON
‘November bells, BT mother, birth banksias, PP nude in a garden’ 2024
acrylic on polycotton,
183 x 198 cm

Congratulations to Pia Murphy who has been awarded a 2025 Visual Arts Fellowship to begin a residency in Montauk, New York. The fellowship was awarded through the Edward F. Albee Foundation and recognises the great talent of a range of artists bi-annually. The foundation aims to provide opportunities to a range of artists through a residency at ‘The Barn’, made possible through the abundant proceeds from the play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, memorialising Edward F Albee’s contribution to the arts.

IMAGE:

Pia Murphy in her studio, courtesy Rhys Lee

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalists in the 2024 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her work ‘Self and still life (shared garden, future nurture)'.

The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.

Finalists exhibition will be held at the S.H Ervin Gallery, 25 October – 15 December 2024, Sydney

IMAGE:
Sally Anderson
Self and still life (shared garden, future nurture) 2024
acrylic on polycotton
183 x 198cm

READ MORE HERE

Aligned with his recent show at Edwina Corlette Gallery, Rhys Lee opens up to Tom Gerrard about his painting practice, upbringing, and the behind the scenes of his exhibitions.

LISTEN HERE

IMAGE:

Rhys Lee
Big Fight (Undefeated) 2024
oil on canvas
205 x 156 cm

Image used on the cover of this Bench Talk podcast episode.

Miranda Skoczek has been a guest on ABC Radio National, delving into the new direction of her current exhibition at Post Space in Exeter, England. In a vibrant conversation with Kimberly Price, Miranda explains the deeply personal body of work, and her distinctive abstract painting.

LISTEN HERE

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek with her exhibition 'Red Ribbons', Post Space, Exeter, courtesy the artist

Delighted to announce that Sally Anderson has been selected as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize with her work ‘Holding a hurricane, quilt curtain carrying the sea’.

How do you hold a hurricane? How do you hold close things that are spiralling out of your control? Can you contain the sea in a quilt? How do we measure domestic, creative and maternal labour? With time? How does one get more time in a day? How do we hold households, partners, children, paintings, parents and ourselves simultaneously? This painting speaks to the ways motherhood, domesticity and creative practice are, for me, reciprocal and ultimately entangled. Each informs and infects the other. This work deliberately dances between abstraction and representation and employs still-life and landscape motifs as symbols of containment and care.

- Sally Anderson, 2024

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Holding a hurricane, quilt curtain carrying the sea 2024

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

182.5 x 198.2 cm

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Congratulations Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the 2024 Bayside Painting Prize for her 2024 work ‘Placenta banksia, Bridal Veil Falls view, the sea in me, PB nude quilt tablecloth’. Established in 2015, the Bayside Painting Prize is one of the most generous non-acquisitive painting prizes in Australia. The exhibition draws together a breadth of artists with varied approaches to painting. This allows the Bayside City Council to further develop its collection and promote artists to the Bayside community.

The finalist exhibition will be held at Bayside Gallery from 3 May to 23 June 2024.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Placenta banksia, Bridal Veil Falls view, the sea in me, PB nude quilt tablecloth 2024

acrylic on polycotton

168 x 137 cm

Image courtesy the artist and Jessica Maurer

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At the time they both connected over their love for nature and now, roughly 10 years later Miranda has collaborated with Katie [Kolodinski] to curate The Protection Collection. Centred around symbolism and the rituals of self-protection including the iconic Aster flower, central to Katie’s upbringing, this was a harmonious alignment given Miranda’s style of art which is deeply influenced by historical references and ancient cultures.

For Miranda, her art allows people to explore other worlds and she hopes that placing her designs on clothing encourages people to have those conspectus conversations as well.

In line with this creative endeavour, she shared insights on her practices, creating the collection and her relationship with symbolism.

- Silk Laundry

IMAGE:

Courtesy Silk Laundry

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson, who has been announced as a finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award for her painting 'Nat Silk’s Seatown Still Life, PB Nude Quilt, Bromeliad Washdown'.

The biennial Grace Cossington Smith Art Award is a $20,000 National acquisitive award. The award theme is 'Making Connections' inspired by the work of Abbotsleigh graduate and artist Grace Cossington Smith - renowned for her Modern abstraction paintings of Australia. The finalist exhibition opens 27 January 2024 at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Wahroonga, Sydney.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Nat Silk's Seatown Still Life, PB Nude Quilt, Bromeliad Washdown 2023

acrylic on polycotton

153 x 137 cm

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Rhys Lee is featured in Issue 42 of Beautiful Bizarre.

Leesa Hickey, Director of Side Gallery in Australia, has selected 8 works in the market that she wishes to add to her personal collection. Amongst these 8 works is Rhys Lee's 2021 Polkadot Robe.

IMAGE:

Rhys Lee

Polkadot Robe 2021

oil on canvas

95 x 78 cm

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Tim McMonagle's painting 'Plaza' is currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the 'brick vase clay cup jug' exhibition.

Guest curator Glenn Barkley selected the artworks in 'brick vase clay cup jug' by typing the words of the exhibition title into the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ online collection database, retrieving objects linked only by a word or medium. Unlike the typical approach to making an exhibition, where works are grouped conceptually according to meanings or historical associations, this selection process is non-hierarchical and echoes the random groupings seen in gallery storage. Usually guided by pragmatic considerations – maximising space and access or caring for the collection – these incidental groupings can create inspiring and surprising links between disparate objects, art-handling equipment and exhibition furniture.

Barkley has then taken cues from these search results, either aesthetic or conceptual, to cast a wider net through the collection, creating new connections – many of which are personal, visual, intuitive and emotional – between artworks.

- Art Gallery New South Wales

The exhibition is open until January 2024

IMAGE:

Tim McMonagle

Plaza (installation view) 2005

oil on linen

180 x 180 cm

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Sally Anderson is featured in the July/August edition of Art Guide Australia.

Motherhood, domesticity, landscape, memory—these are just some of the experiences and memories Sally Anderson has captured in her two-decade painting practice, underpinned by a persistent blue.

The outer edges of Sally Anderson’s paintings reveal multiple layers of canvas, the evidence of past works painted over yet still present deep within. Integral to how Anderson works, this layering connects to ideas of containment and the action of being physically held. “This could refer to a mother carrying her baby, being restricted to the home, a vessel holding flowers, frames, windows or pools,” she says.

- Briony Downes, Art Guide, 2023

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson in her Studio, courtesy Jessica Mauer

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in this year's Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize with her work ‘Sea Town Lawn Roof Song with NO’s Vessel.’

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Sea Town Lawn Roof Song with NO’s Vessel 2023

acrylic on canvas

115 x 97 cm

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Miranda Skoczek is featured in ‘Artists at Home’ a new book about Australian female artists by Karina Dias Pires, published by Thames and Hudson, out now.

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek, courtesy Karina Dias Pires

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in this year's Muswellbrook Art Prize with her work ‘Lismore Island Roof Song with a Screenshot of Nat Silk’s Seatown’.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Lismore Island Roof Song with a Screenshot of Nat Silk’s Seatown 2022

acrylic on polycotton

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Sally Anderson has received a glowing review in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sally Anderson’s Guido 'Holding Folding Moulding' is another stand-out. Ostensibly a portrait of her artist husband holding their child, there’s a metaphysical dimension to the work, with a sculpture on a pedestal, a jug with flowers and a red, flag-like curtain taking up significant space in the composition. The play of curves and fractured planes adds to the mystery of the picture, as we feel we are looking through multiple doorways or windows, projecting a dream-like atmosphere.

- John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald, 2022.

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the Portia Geach Award at SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney.

The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.

The exhibition is open 16 September – 6 November 2022

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Guido holding, folding, moulding 2022

acrylic on polycotton

198 x 153 cm

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Blue Island investigates the interplay of colour and memory in relation to individual experience. Paintings draw on hydrangea related respective experience to demonstrate the capacity for colour and object to hold and trigger memory and association. The exhibition seeks to question the reliability of memory and offers a way to authenticate experience through colour. In attempting to realise something perhaps visually impossible to verify within their paintings; mixing colour truthfully and straightforwardly from memory, the artists are challenged to settle on feeling and intuitive correctness rather than absolute truth and certainty.

Using a uniform size canvas, the 14 invited artists were instructed to translate, from their ‘mind’s eye’, the colour they most strongly associate with their experience of hydrangeas. The result is a collection of essentially monochrome surfaces steeped with hidden and concealed recollections of mothers and mother’s mothers, former neighbours and neighbourhoods, marriage, childbirth city front-yards, suburban backyards, households and broken family homes. More visually evident (than the personal histories imbued in the paintings) is the materiality and individually distinctive application of paint to surface. These largely monochrome works give a condensed, and detail like insight into each artist’s painterly signature, almost all of which are instantly recognisable.

- Sally Anderson, 2022

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There is more to Miranda Skoczek’s paintings than immediately meets the eye. They are built intuitively and in layers, from colours, patterns and objects that she absorbs in her immediate home environment – and all over the world. They are often abstract, sometimes with figurative elements; they focus on paint and colour, process and time, to create a space that takes us somewhere other, outside the material world. Inspiration comes from art and antiquities, folk art and contemporary design – and through obsessive consumption of images. Skoczek describes herself as “a sponge,” confessing to VAULT: “I have 95,000 photographs on my phone.”

The mystical is evident in Skoczek’s hope that her paintings work like amulets for those who acquire them. Protective elements aside, in their sensual textures and influences, so powerfully evoked, these paintings emerge as poignant and poetic visual essays written to the past and the present."\

- Louise Martin-Chew, Vault Magazine

IMAGE:

Front Cover of Vault Magazine, Issue 37, 2022, featuring Miranda Skoczek's Dreaming of Betty (Woodman), 2018

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Established in 2015, the Bayside Painting Prize is one of the most generous non-acquisitive painting prizes in Australia. The exhibition draws together a breadth of artists with varied approaches to painting. This allows the Bayside City Council to futher promote artists to the Bayside community from across Australia, providing painters with support to continue their practice.

Tim McMonagle's work 'Put Upon' 2020 is a finalist in this year's prize.

IMAGE:

Tim McMonagle

Put upon 2020

oil on linen

138 x 138 cm

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Sally Anderson has been included in an exhibition and article by The Australian which highlight new Australian art on the market.

It’s this moment of evolution that has inspired The Australian’s Summer Exhibition — a showcase of sculptures, paintings, photographs and works on paper. Beautiful to look at, it’s a celebration of some of the best and brightest artists working today. All 50 pieces have been selected because they signify what’s happening in Australian art and culture right now.

So, what is happening right now? The primary art market in Australia is experiencing a small boom. For obvious reasons, flying to international art fairs is off the cards, and this has led Australian collectors to rediscover a local market packed full of prodigious works by tomorrow’s household names.

It means there’s a renewed focus on Australian stories and more opportunities for emerging artists to have their work seen, as gallerists and buyers look toward home. It’s this time of risk-taking and yes, even optimism that our summer exhibition represents.

- Amy Campbell, The Australian, 2021

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Copywriter and content specialist Elle McClure was asked by the team at Medium Rare Content agency to help produce content for the autumn 2021 issue of the David Jones magazine, JONES HOME. As well as compiling trend pages and writing copy across the issue, Elle interviewed Otis Hope Carey, Louise Olsen and Miranda Skoczek as part of profiles on the artists.

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'Lovelock' is the presentation of a new suite of paintings by Tim McMonagle that have been directly informed by a new suite of sound works, produced for this project by Paul Knight, who is resident in Berlin.

Transference. The change of elemental states. The search for a place not here nor there.

These were our early concepts for the exhibition. Be careful what you wish for. Despite an unpredictable year in all corners of the globe, the original framework for the project is in place: to commission work from one artist to inform the work of the other. The idea & process is elliptical and is revealed over a period of time in three sections.

The fulcrum is a set of paintings by Tim McMonagle. They will be made using source imagery around the idea of “A Place Between / Not here nor there”. We approached Paul Knight in Berlin to create source images generated by this diaristic photographic practice. Then the pandemic happened, and nothing was the same.

In isolation in Berlin, Paul had immersed himself in his music practice, making soundscapes without traditional song structures, using sources completely derived from synthetic sounds: purely electronic space. The fit with the original concept was perfect. We devised a limit of the 12” LP to set the duration of the material. The square of the LP cover echoes Tim’s exclusive canvas ratio, the square.

The six tracks are to be issued as source material to McMonagle for his body of paintings. Tim has always hankered to work with a non-visual source for a group of paintings & this serendipitous outcome has both artists exhilarated by the possibility of extending their practice.

- Greenwood Street Project

The final part of this work is the unification of the germinal sound work by Paul Knight. Tim McMonagle’s paintings, and documentation of the exhibition to be presented at Greenwood Street Project in early 2021 in an LP/catalogue.

LISTEN HERE

Congratulations to Sally Anderson whose upcoming exhibition has been featured in Brisbane Art Guide.

To coincide with her exhibition at Tweed Regional Gallery, Edwina Corlette Gallery is delighted to present a series of new paintings by Sally Anderson. Sally is a past winner of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and a finalist in this year’s Portia Geach Award for female portraiture, with her painting of Claudia Karvan (below).

Born in Lismore, Anderson began her undergraduate studies in Visual Art at Southern Cross University before transferring to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. A past finalist in the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Anderson was invited to participate in the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists Residency in Reykjavik in 2014. Her work has been acquired by Artbank, the Australian Catholic University and corporate and private clients in Australia and Europe.

- Brisbane Art Guide, 2020

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The concept of home has changed in 2020. For a lot of people, home has never been just one static place, and yet in the last few months that stasis has been forced upon us. In the midst of shelter-in-place orders, we’ve been directed to decide on a single location that represents our place in the world and stay there, hoping it keeps us safe.

Reframing the domestic space as a new landscape intrigues artist and new mother Sally Anderson. Her new body of work is entitled Bridal Veil Falls, the Window and the Piano Lesson, and was created almost entirely in lockdown. The pieces will be on display at Edwina Corlette gallery in Brisbane from tomorrow, in an exhibition that explores the fusion between Sally’s subjective experience of parenthood, and the collective endurance of pandemic paralysis.

- Sasha Gattermayr, The Design Files, 2020

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To help my son sleep we put on white noise of a small river in Scotland and Llyn Gwynant waves in Wales. The toponomy of Lismore indicates it was named after Isle of Lismore which lies in Loch Linnhe, an arm of the sea, on the West Coast of Scotland. I was born in Lismore early 1990, an experience I hadn’t intimately considered until the birth of my son a couple of years ago. My son was conceived in the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio at Tweed Regional Gallery. There’s a pair of hoop pines (aka Richmond River Pines) that dominate the side view from the residency verandah. I often use these trees, along with banksias, within my work to represent the Northern Rivers region, my transition to motherhood and European exploration/invasion of Australia.

The works in 'Arm of the Sea and the Fertile Tree' use landscape metaphor rather than subject. Intimate personal experience and collective experience are translated into paintings, bedspreads, windows, still lifes and stages.

- Sally Anderson, 2020

The exhibition is open from 3 July — 29 November 2020

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Sally Anderson's work 'Claude Swimming' has been selected as a finalist in the Portia Geach Prize for 2020. The painting of Claudia Karvan, actress, producer and writer will be exhibited at the National Trust's S.H. Ervin Gallery.

The Portia Geach Memorial Award was established in 1965 to be annually presented to an Australian female artist. Portia Geach was an iconic figure in the Australian arts community, acclaimed for her art and media presence, and as such the award was created in her honour. The award is specifically for the best portrait painted from the life of someone well renowned in art, academia, or science.

The exhibition will be open in Sydney from 14 August – 20 September 2020.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Claude Swimming, 2020

acrylic on linen

168 x 137cm

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Rhys Lee has been featured in an article by Juxtapoz on his experience as a practicing artist in Australia during the covid pandemic.

Continuing our mission to check with friends and favorite artists around the globe, we virtually traveled all the way to Victoria, Australia, to check on what's happening with Rhys Lee. Based in a small coastal town located southwest of Melbourne, the artist is a whirl of activity as he intensively works on new paintings.

- Juxtapoz

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'Artefacts', Alison Kubler, Vault Magazine, Issue 23, 104-105pp.

My paintings talk of relationship, context and metaphor. They are loaded with autobiographical content, draw on past and present experiences and often arrive in pairs. Recent paintings use abstraction, still life and borrowed landscapes to reference everyday intimate experience held in object and place. They explore the self and use abstraction, landscape and still life as devices to do so.

- Sally Anderson, The Design Files, 2019.

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Sally Anderson's work 'Side of the Road River with Rousseau's Bluebells' has been selected as a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize

Mosman Art Prize was established in 1947, and is Australia's oldest and most prestigious local government art award. The winning artworks join a collection of modern and contemporary Australian art, reflecting developments in Australian art practice since 1947. Artists who have won the Mosman Art Prize include Margaret Olley, Guy Warren, Grace Cossington Smith, Weaver Hawkins, Nancy Borlase, Lloyd Rees, Elisabeth Cummings, Adam Cullen, Michael Zavros and Natasha Walsh.

The exhibition is open until 27 October 2019 at Mosman Art Gallery

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Side of the Road River with Rousseau's Bluebells 2019

acrylic on linen

courtesy the artist

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Tim McMonagle intimately confronts both the fragile and robust nature of life. With an obsession for mark-making and the act of painting, he depicts humanised landscapes with whimsical contradictions of impasto and swathing washes. His paintings require a closer inspection, as dangling branches and wailing trees act like entwined torsos to question humanity’s relationship to the environment. Artist Profile spoke to McMonagle in his Melbourne studio for Issue 46.

- Ellinor Pelz, Artist Profile

IMAGE:

Tim McMonagle

Magnificent Pavlova With Bananas 2019

oil on linen

77 x 77 cm

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We are delighted to see works by Sally Anderson, Belem Lett, Lucy O'Doherty, and Amber Wallis in the new exhibition 'The Whiteley at 20: Twenty Years of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship', as previous finalists of the award.

Established by Ms Beryl Whiteley in 1999 in memory of her son, the 'Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship' provides young painters with the opportunity to travel through Europe to develop their artistic practice. Since its inception, 20 young painters have followed in the titular artist's footsteps.

The exhibition features works by Sally Anderson, Alice Byrne, Mitch Cairns, James Drinkwater, Petrea Fellow, Becky Gibson, Nathan Hawkes, Alan Jones, Nicole Kelly, Belem Lett, Lucy O’Doherty, Wayde Owen, Timothy Phillips, Tom Polo, Ben Quilty, Karlee Rawkins, Samuel Wade, Amber Wallis, Natasha Walsh, and Marcus Wills, alongside the four paintings that won Brett Whiteley the Italian Government Travelling Scholarship.

The exhibition presents not only the works that won the scholarship, but features works from each artist's residency at the Cite Internationale des Art, Paris and recent work.

The exhibition is open from 22 March - 5 May 2019 at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney.

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In celebration of Gorman’s decade-long collaboration with visual artists, Heide is presenting a two-week pop-up exhibition in the iconic modernist building, Heide II.

The exhibition will feature garments from a new range by Gorman created in collaboration with ten artists who have worked with the Australian clothing label since 2009, including Miranda Skoczek. The garments will be displayed alongside the artworks which inspired them.

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Sally Anderson's work ‘Guy’s Painting of Wollumbin on my Wollumbin’ has been acquired by Tweed Regional Gallery. In 2017 Sally was an artist in residence at the Nancy Fairfax Artist Residency through the Tweed Regional Gallery and throughout her life, has had strong connections to the region.

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Guy's Painting of Wollumbin on my Wollumbin 2018

acrylic on linen

140 x 122 cm

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Miranda Skoczek, Julian Meagher and John Aslanidis are finalists in The Kings School Art Prize 2018.

The King’s Art Prize is a $20,000 acquisitive award presented to the best contemporary artwork created by an artist resident in Australia and represented by a commercial gallery, supporting both the artists and the fine arts industry. Entry is by invitation only and the finalists are selected by an appointed Art Prize panel.

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Congratulations to Sally Anderson who is a finalist in the Paddington Art Prize 2018.

The Paddington Art Prize is a $30,000 National acquisitive prize, awarded annually. The prize is specific to paintings inspired by the Australian landscape, as the imagery is integral to the tradition of Australia painting and is an enduring motif within contemporary art, shaping national identity.

This work uses ‘borrowed landscapes’ to look at ways we experience the Australian landscape from the comfort of our homes. It uses landscape as a device to demonstrate a shift in the way we experience landscape.

- Sally Anderson


IMAGE:

Sally Anderson
Sharing Thirroul (Paul Ryan's Post Of Thirroul With Curtain) 2017
acrylic on linen
140 x 124 cm

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Tim McMonagle is a finalist in the 2018 Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In my painting 'Shadow captain' I was interested in capturing an imagined anthropomorphic nature. In the changing low light of dawn or dusk the large eucalyptus seems to twist and contort, fastened to the ground where it is anchored.'

- Tim McMonagle, 2018

IMAGE:

Tim McMonagle

Shadow Captain 2018

oil on linen

50.5 x 50.5 cm

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Sally Anderson's recent exhibition 'Self Storage and the Really Real' is featured in the January edition of the Art Almanac.

'Self Storage and the Really Real’ looks at ways we authenticate experience and store memory in object and place’, says artist Sally Anderson whose abstract compositions brim with clear references to past experiences; from the hydrangeas at her childhood home to shells from the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and Norfolk Pines from recent Instagram posts to landscapes from past and present relationships. These works are a visual archive giving permanence to intangible memories and making them, as the title implies, ‘really real’.

- Art Almanac

IMAGE:

Sally Anderson

Tosha Falls as Curtains with Deegan Drive or LJs Mums Hydrangeas, 2018

acrylic on linen

122 x 122 cm

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Miranda Skoczek's exhibition 'Rag Rugs and Lion Heads' is featured on the Art Guide website. Miranda spoke with Louise Martin-Chew about her latest exhibition 'Rag Rugs and Lion Heads', her inspiration and the shift in her practice to looser, more expressive works:

Miranda Skoczek’s abstract paintings evoke old walls with layers of forms and shapes that emerge over time. In her studio, she might work simultaneously on nine canvases. Transferring from one to the other, she allows each oil layer to dry before repeatedly painting over it until jewel-like colours resonate and a spatial sensibility has been established within which the viewer may dwell. Skoczek told Art Guide Australia, “I don’t paint about social concerns. I create wholly immersive, beautiful pictures. They are places for escape and restoration: harmonious, calming pictures.”

- Louise Martin Chew

Miranda's exhibition is at the gallery from 14 November until 5 December 2017.

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Miranda Skoczek was a featured artist in the international group exhibition, The human experience, we are the ones doing works on canvas/Paintings XXXX at the Carlsberg Byens Galleri & Kunstsalon in Denmark. The exhibition was curated by Galina Munroe (Great Britain), Simon Ganshorn (Denmark) and Jordan Kerwick (Australia). The show featured 116 artists each working with abstraction through painting in their own distinct manner to promote diversity and highlight the possibility of medium and painting theory.

READ MORE HERE.

Sally Anderson has been awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship for 2017.

The prize is $40,000 and a three month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The annual Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship is open to Australian artists aged between 20 and 30. It was created from an endowment left by Beryl Whiteley, who witnessed the profound effect that international travel had on her son Brett Whiteley, as a result of him winning the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship at the age of 20.

The exhibition will open 13 October – 19 November 2017 at Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.

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Sally Anderson has been selected as a finalist in Newcastle Art Gallery's Kilgour Prize.

In 1987 artist Jack Kilgour bequeathed funds for the creation of a figurative and portrait art competition to be run in perpetuity at Newcastle Art Gallery. Today the Kilgour Prize is one of Australia's major art prizes and awards $50,000 for the most outstanding work of art as determined by a panel of three judges, and $5,000 for the People's Choice Award, as determined by votes from the public.

The Kilgour Prize will be on display 5 August - 15 October 2017.

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The Sunshine Coast Art Prize is a national contemporary acquisitive award presented by Sunshine Coast Council. The Award is open to any artist who is an Australian resident, working in a 2D medium.

Forty finalists have been selected for an exhibition at the Caloundra Regional Gallery and the winning work will be added to the Sunshine Coast Art Collection.

Angela Goddard is the judge for the Sunshine Coast Prize 2017. Angela is the Director of Griffith Artworks, responsible for the Griffith University Art Collection and the Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane. Angela was previously the Curator of Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Winners announced 31 August.

IMAGE:

Tim McMonagle

In The Middle 2016

oil on linen

122 x 122 cm

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Miranda Skoczek presents her first collection of jewellery works at Pieces of Eight Gallery in Melbourne as part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2017.

In DESHILADO, Miranda pays homage to the samplers created by stitchers in the early 16th Century. The collection is a three dimensional gathering of a myriad of interests and influences remixing materials and techniques, blurring the boundaries between objects, jewellery and art.

With a desire to connect ancient traditions with fashion, while acknowledging the archaeological importance of jewellery as artefact, Skoczek takes the opportunity to bring permanency to ornaments that have up to this point existed as abstract fragments in her paintings.

The exhibition is current until 25 March 2017.

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Miranda Skoczek is featured on The Design Files blog with a look at her move from an inner city two bedroom apartment, to a bucolic retreat set amongst the verdant landscape of the Dandenong Ranges. Miranda and her seven year old son Harper speak about the influence of nature on their lives and the impact a move to the country will have on her painting practice.

IMAGE:

Miranda Skoczek and her son, courtesy Caitlin Mills

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Iconic Australian blog The Design Files visited Sally Anderson in her studio recently, to see how things were progressing in the lead up to her first solo exhibition.

Working predominantly with a muted colour palette, the artist will often add an unexpected contrast, like a brush of bright magenta. ‘For me, working with colour is very intuitive; I might spend weeks working with dusky colours, only to come in one day needing to mix a cyan blue,

The paintings are an ongoing process of adding layers and marks. Sometimes Sally will paint over a work in her studio that she’d thought she was long done with. ‘My partner once said that my pieces are a bit like découpage… with individual snippets and cut-outs layered heavily onto a surface,’ she says. ‘My mum has always loved crafts and used to actually découpage the furniture in our house… maybe that’s unknowingly made an impression on me!’

- Sally Tabart, The Design Files, 2021

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Carrie McCarthy has written a thoughtful piece about Tim McMonagle's recent exhibition at Edwina Corlette Gallery for her brilliant blog Cultural Flanerie. The article coincided with Tim's first exhibition at the Gallery which continued his exploration of our majestic native gum trees.

There is something eerily familiar about the trees that have begun to sprout up in Tim McMonagle’s work in recent times. An artist who has spent almost two decades disseminating human nature’s foibles and absurdities through his whimsical compositions, McMonagle has increasingly found himself compelled to consider the curious lifecycle of our majestic native gums.

- Carrie McCarthy, Cultural Flanerie

IMAGE:

Install view of Tim McMonagle 'Recent work', image courtesy the artist

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Miranda Skoczek is renowned for her engaging, energetic works and her spectacular use of colour. A fixture on the Australian art scene, her work is instantly recognisable for its layers of intuitive colour, pattern and motifs. Iconic Australian label Country Road thought her work was perfect for a collaboration with charity RedKite. Miranda has designed two tote bags and a t-shirt, with all proceeds from each sale going towards providing essential support to children and their families who are facing cancer.

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Miranda Skoczek in her home, courtesy Country Road

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Tim McMonagle's work 'Ken Pearler' recently featured in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's exhibition 'Painting. More Painting'.

Presented in two chapters across ACCA’s four exhibition galleries, Painting. More Painting was a big-picture focus on contemporary Australian painting, featuring the work of over 70 living Australian artists.

Conceived by ACCA Curator Annika Kristensen and Associate Curator Hannah Mathews, and developed in collaboration with ACCA’s new Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany, Painting. More Painting brought together a range of painting practices that reflected the medium’s enduring importance and its recent return to the centre of much public debate.

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Miranda Skoczek has collaborated with Gorman Clothing for their 2015 winter collection. In sync with the label’s aesthetic, Miranda’s artwork blends seamlessly into signature Gorman textures and styles. Her work is featured across all 53 pieces in the collection, with every print originating from five of her artworks.

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Dr Ashley Crawford - a freelance cultural critic based in Melbourne - has written a glowing essay on the progression of Rhys Lee's art practice.

Lee’s passport is stamped with a variety of exotic locales; he has been to Anger, he has stopped over in Love, he has traversed the landscape of Fear and, jet-lagged, he has experienced the Delirium of insomnia.

Like all adventurous travellers, Lee is a voyeur of the unknown. As this book opens we see him astride in alien locales, sheltering in a snow-capped tent in Scandinavia, peering over a swimming pool in a sweltering Havana. And there, early in his travels, are the first tentative sketches, faces – whether faces in the street or self-portraits is nary an issue; in many ways all of Lee’s work are self-portrayal. In 1999, the eyes stare out, Klimt-like, a mixture of defiance and trepidation. That same year, Lee discovers his trademark harshly-cropped skull in Haircut (1999). By 2000 the die is cast in a more assured self-portrait complete with sketchbook, a portrait of the artist as a young man.

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courtesy NBB Gallery, Berlin

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