Celebrated Australian artist eX de Medici’s career spans 40 years with the artist’s central concerns including the fragility of life, global affairs, greed and commerce, and the universal themes of power, conflict, and death. Here we delve into two companion works — The theory of everything 2005 and Live the (Big Black) Dream 2006. …
Continue reading » “eX de Medici: Something wicked this way comes”
eX de Medici’s extraordinarily layered works reveal the artist’s ongoing concern with the value and fragility of life, global affairs, greed, commerce, conflict and death. ‘Oh, what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?’, screeches the Wicked Witch of the West in…
Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe’s watercolour Houses of Parliament, Brisbane 1885 (illustrated) was painted just before the artist left Australia to return to England. We can clearly see Queensland’s Parliament House and other recognisable Brisbane landmarks from across the river in a depiction of the daily life of a port city named after the river that runs…
Continue reading » “Go back in time to 1885 when Brisbane was a young township”
Three Queensland Anzacs — Hogarth brothers Alexander Forbes (1886–1915), Archibald McDonald (1879–1916) and Joseph (1877–1918) — are remembered in stained glass windows designed by local artist William Bustard (1894-1973) in St Andrews Anglican Church (illustrated) at Pittsworth, a town in the Darling Downs region, 41 kilometres from Toowoomba and 169 kilometres south-west of Brisbane, and…
Continue reading » “Stained glass windows in memory of ANZACs”
In 2022 as we celebrate 40 years of the Queensland Art Gallery at South Bank, it is fitting to note that when the new building designed by Robin Gibson opened in 1982, it occurred in the same year as the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vida Lahey1, described as ‘an indefatigable advocate for art…
Margaret Olley moved to Brisbane when she was 12 and was a boarder at Somerville House school for girls in South Brisbane from 1937 to 1940 where they were quick to recognise Olley’s talents and recommended to her mother that she attend art school. Her friend and fellow artist Margaret Cilento also began formal art…
Continue reading » “Go back in time to Margaret Olley’s Brisbane”
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.