Telecommunications company Optus will provide 5G connection to Art Gallery of NSW. Under the three-year partnership, Optus will bring 5G to the A.
Dhungatti artist Blak Douglas has won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens making him the second indigenous artist to claim the prestigious prize.
Jeffrey Smart is admired for his carefully structured paintings of Tuscany and Rome. This National Gallery of Australia’s centenary celebration of his birth takes the viewer back to Adelaide.
In its centenary year, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales could not resist the symbolism of awarding the Archibald Prize to Peter Werner’s portrait of the 100 year old Guy Warren.
In 2008, when I first visited Canberra’s newly opened National Portrait Gallery, my first response was an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I knew many of those paintings. They had once hung on the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the annual Archibald Prize exhibition, or been seen in the Salon des Refusés home to the best of the rejects.
Over 49 years I have seen the Archibald from both the inside, as a curator, and the outside as a critic. My first Archibald was in 1972, the year Clifton Pugh won with his portrait of Gough Whitlam. Along with other art history students, I had never been especially interested in this festival of popular culture, but as the recently appointed most junior of all curators my job was to administer the prize.