Highlight: Zhou Tao ‘Blue and Red’

Recently acquired for the Collection, this video work demonstrates APT8 artist Zhou Tao’s use of editing techniques to combine two separate spaces into a new, meaningful ‘third’ space. Based in Guangzhou, in China’s highly urbanised Pearl River Delta, Zhou Tao is part of a generation of Chinese artists born after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that…

Blandford Fletcher’s ‘Evicted’ is a Gallery favourite

As exhibitions, collection priorities, directors, and curators  are constantly changing, in an art gallery it is difficult sometimes to decide what should remain on more-or-less ‘permanent’ display. One of the Gallery’s most popular works with visitors is Blandford Fletcher’s painting Evicted, depicting a mother and daughter and their nosey neighbours. Whenever taken off display, it’s…

APT8 Highlight: Shigeyuki Kihara

Acquired for the Collection with the generous assistance of Mary-Jeanne Hutchinson, this intriguing series of photographs by Shigeyuki Kihara responds to the images of Samoa taken by Alfred Burton, who visited the Pacific in the 1880s, and looks to redress stereotypes of the Pacific perpetuated in colonial photography. In the late nineteenth century, French artist…

Robert MacPherson: A simplistic view of a national art

Robert MacPherson’s work is often positioned against the historically pervasive national traditions in Australian art of landscape painting and heroic narrative. His works evoking landscape and important figures are tinged with irony, and attempt to look beyond stereotype and jingoism. Yet still they suggest something specifically Australian – whether it is language, food or cultural…

Highlight: Rex Warrimou (Sabiö) ‘Our Creation (Ömie)’

Created by the only male Ömie barkcloth painter, this detailed visual creation story, recently acquired by the Gallery, marks a significant departure for the Ömie people of Papua New Guinea. In 2009, 63-year-old law man Rex Warrimou began the process of recounting the Papua New Guinean Ömie people’s creation story to young Australian curator Brennan…

Madeleine Kelly creates birds using drink containers

Madeleine Kelly is well known for her figurative paintings that assemble information gleaned from the fields of archaeology and the sciences. Her works convey an ecological awareness with a stroke of magic realism. In this installation, Kelly has recreated species of birds – somewhat whimsically, using Tetra Pak drink containers – that she has identified…