Art Wank

Episode 254 - Lustre: Artistic Responses to the ANZAC Campaign in Greece and Crete 1941

Lustre is a new temporary exhibition that explores the Allied campaigns in Greece and Crete in 1941 through the works of contemporary artists who walked in their footsteps in 2025. Lustre Force was the code name for the combined Australian, New Zealand and British army units deployed to protect Greece from Nazi attack in 1941. The Allied defence of Greece was overwhelmed in three and a half weeks in April 1941 and in May, Crete fell to a Nazi airborne invasion in just ten days. To record those heroic but doomed campaigns, Australia and New Zealand sent war artists and a photographer.  Eighty-five years later, artists from Australia and New Zealand retraced their footsteps, walking the battlefields and visiting the cemeteries where the men and women of Lustre Force and their German foe lie. Lustre showcases the impressions they made of the impact of that journey. Some of the images show that the land and its people have recovered over time; others reveal that some scars take longer to fade. The exhibition opens on 15 May 2026 and is in the Memorial’s Auditorium on the Lower Floor. The Memorial is open every day, 9am to 5pm. Please note that access to the exhibition is dependent on the Auditorium’s use for education and other programs, so we encourage you to call the Memorial in advance on (02) 8262 2900. Entry is free Artists: Amanda Penrose Hart, Euan Mcleoud, Joanna Logue, Alan Daniel Jones, Deirdre Bean, Riste Andrievski, Angelika Androutsopolous, Michael Bradfield, Michelle Hiscock, Steve Lopes, Natalie OConnor and Rodney Pople Historian: Brad Manera, the Senior Historian and Curator of the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Episode 253 - Bonus Episode with artist and Art Wank host Julie Nicholson

Gary has a chat with artist Julie Nicholson [https://www.instagram.com/julienicholsonartist/] about her show, Nostalgia, opening May 21st at CBD Gallery in Sydney. Julie has recently exhibited with CBD Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair (NZ), and her work has been widely recognised in national awards such as the Paddington Art Prizre and the Muswellbrook, and held in private collections in Australia and overseas. She co-hosts the popular arts podcast, Art Wank. Her duo solo exhibition, Nostalgia, stems from a sense of homesickness after moving from the UK to Australia at the age of 23. A deep sense of nostalgia has shaped her life, and only recently did she discover that nostalgia was once considered a disease. The works in this exhibition sit within that tension, posing the question of whether nostalgia is something that nurtures us, or something that holds us back. Many of the canvases in the exhibition are split across multiple panels, reflecting the fractured experience of trying to locate familiarity within a foreign landscape. Moments of recognition such as sketching in Berrima in the Southern Highlands, where the landscape can feel momentarily like home are interrupted by distinctly Australian elements, like a palm tree or native plant, which jolt her back into the awareness of distance and displacement. Julie has also titled many of the works using Old English words for landscape elements—such as weald, meaning forest. This reflects her interest in etymology and the evolution of language over time. Just as words shift, fall out of use, and take on new meanings, her understanding of the Australian landscape has also changed. Language, like memory, holds a connection to the past while continually adapting to the present, mirroring her experience of navigating place, identity, and belonging. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Episode 252 - Brett Mcmahon: A Poetic Repsonse to Landscape

Brett McMahon [https://www.brettmcmahon.com.au/] is a Newcastle-based painter whose work explores the structures and rhythms of the natural and built environment. Represented by Nanda Hobbs, McMahon has built a significant practice spanning painting, drawing and installation. His work is known for its distilled, abstract language, bold lines, shifting geometries and a strong sense of spatial tension. Drawing from the coastal bush, industrial architecture and lived experience of place, his paintings sit somewhere between observation and reconstruction, where landscape becomes structure. Over a career spanning more than three decades, McMahon has held over 30 solo exhibitions and exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. His work is held in public, corporate and private collections across Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States.  In this conversation, we talk about painting as a way of thinking, the role of environment in shaping visual language, and how a practice evolves over time without losing its core concerns. We also get into scale, material and the push and pull between control and intuition in the studio. Brett is represented by Nanda Hobbs [https://nandahobbs.com/artists/brett-mcmahon/] in Sydney Brett's show at Gosford Art Gallery [https://gosfordregionalgallery.com/page/brett-mcmahon-under-story] Understory, opens 16th May 2026 ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Episode 251 - Joe Frost - Between Stations

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/933121/fan_mail/new] Joe Frost is an Australian artist. He was born in Sydney in 1974 and has exhibited consistently since 1999. His visual thinking evolved in the urban environment and he is, in a sense, a local painter. Sydney’s remnant industrial areas were the subject of his earliest drawings and paintings and he has made extensive series of work in response to the western reaches of Sydney Harbour, the city’s CBD and the green, suburban precinct of Denistone. At times he has worked en plein air but his renditions of place have more usually been filtered through memory in the studio, where his approach to painting is improvisatory and layered.  Over 25 years his process of finding-in-paint has come to manifest a great variety of subject matters, including public places, garden spaces, domestic objects and human figures in social situations. Some paintings land upon abstraction and are no less concerned with the matter of recognition: what is presented on the picture plane and what does the mind make of it? In all of Joe Frost's work a process is in play, whereby meaningful visual structure is divined from the flux of experience. Joe is represented by Liverpool Street Gallery [https://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au/joe-frost-artist-page]in Sydney ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Episode 250 - Painting, motherhood and the poetry of everyday observation with Sally Lee Andersen

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/933121/fan_mail/new] Sally Anderson’s work is strongly influenced by her personal life, including her experiences of home, motherhood and relationships, as well as second hand experiences of landscapes. She explores how meaning and memory are held, stored and carried. Born in Lismore, Sally Anderson began studying Visual Art at Southern Cross University before moving to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize. In 2014 she took part in a residency with the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2017 she won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship through the Art Gallery of NSW and completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. These ideas continue in her upcoming exhibition at N Smith Gallery, opening on 9 April. Called Holding Pattern, River Hug, it builds on her interest in cycles, care, and repetition, with new paintings that shift between abstract and more realistic forms. Sally is represented by N.Smith Gallery (Sydney, Australia) and Edwina Corlette Gallery (Brisbane, Australia).  ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.