Visual Arts

In a period of profound environmental and social upheaval, climate change has become one of our greatest challenges. Yet for many of us, fear, confusion and frustration mean we are reluctant to consider, let alone act on this pressing issue.Rational engagement with science is vital to forming solutions to this challenge. But a cultural shift is also needed. Artists have the capacity to develop a narrative that recognises the reality of our present and inspires a vibrant, positive vision of our future.Presenting the work of Australian and international artists across twenty-nine exhibitions and events, ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE explores the power of art to create the empathy, emotional engagement and cultural understanding needed to motivate meaningful change.

Battarbee and Namatjira is the double biography of artists Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira, one white Australian from Warrnambool in Victoria, the other Aboriginal, of the Arrernte people, from the Hermannsburg Mission west of Alice Springs. From their first encounters in the early 1930s, when Battarbee introduced Namatjira to the techniques of watercolour painting, through the period of Namatjira's extraordinary popularity as a painter, to his tragic death in 1959, their close relationship was to have a decisive impact on Australian art.

Grace Crowley has been recognized as a product of European modernism and was one of the leading innovators of geometric abstraction in Australia. Having studied in Paris in the 1920s with one of the leading art teachers, writers and theorists, André Lhote, she returned to Australia having mastered the complex mathematics and geometry of the golden section and dynamic symmetry, that had become a framework for modernism. Through her teaching of these compositional techniques at the most progressive modern art school in Sydney in the 1930s, she became a crucial influence on the group of artists now recognized as the historical forerunners to American colour-field painting introduced to Australia in the 1960s, and Australian abstraction.

The story of Australian art does not begin and end with landscape. This book puts flowers front and centre, because they have often been ignored in preference for more masculine themes.Departing from where studies of single flower artists leave off, Useless Beauty embraces the general topic of flowers in Australian art and shines new light on a slice of Australian art history that extends from 1880 to 1950. It is the first book of broad chronology to discuss Australian art through blossoms, which it does by addressing stories of major figures including Hans Heysen, Margaret Preston and Sidney Nolan, as well as specific objects such as surreal flowers, Aboriginal flowers and war flowers.

Margaret Olley: A Life in Paint is an intimate documentary about one of Australia’s greatest and most loved painters. Included is footage of Olley speaking passionately about her compulsion to paint, as well as a tour of her home in Paddington by Barry Pearce. A fitting tribute to this legend of Australian art.

Danila Vassilieff was a major Australian artist and personality who was also Russian - a bold cossack, from South Russia, a defender of the czar. His fascinating life and profound humanity are the subject of a compelling and wide-ranging documentary. When individualism was 'in the air' in the 1940s, he liberated a group of younger painters - Nolan, Boyd, Tucker, Hester, Perceval and Blackman - to paint their own original visions. Vassilieff shaped the figurative nature of Australian art