A new solo exhibition by Australian artist Arran Russell, titled SILENT LANGUAGE, will be unveiled on Tuesday 3 May 2022 featuring a series of sculptures, wall assemblages, paintings and works on paper. Presented across the rarely accessed top-floor space of the Verona Penthouse in Paddington, Sydney, the exhibition is free entry and runs until Saturday 7 May 2022.

The inaugural solo exhibition by Arran Russell harnesses a hidden language of shapes which draws upon the artist’s past experience in the design and fashion industries in Australia, Vietnam, China, India, Japan and the United Kingdom. For Russell this meant many years working with the shapes found in garment patterns, often in places where the only shared vocabulary was in the forms laid out between Russell and his collaborators.

In SILENT LANGUAGE, the origins of the cut-out shapes of garment patterns have kept their perplexing, prone characters, floating, nudging, and nestling themselves into new and abstracted compositions. Using movement and gesture Russell delivers previously mass produced materials into a more premium environment. The exhibition presents a series of sculptures formed from clay and wood that will be shown alongside large-scale paintings and works on paper. Many of the works incorporate heavy duty materials such as tar, lead, clay and kaolin, often applied to the surface using only a squeegee and a spatula, with the resulting abstracted forms taking on a gritty and permeable texture.

Ngununggula, the Southern Highlands’ first regional art gallery, will present ambitious new and existing works by leading contemporary artists and brothers Abdul-Rahman Abdullah and Abdul Abdullah in dialogue with four significant video installations by one of their greatest influences, Tracey Moffatt AO. For the exhibition, titled Land Abounds, the Abdullah brothers will each present a new large-scale commissioned artwork responding to the Southern Highlands’ landscape and the complexity of our shared history, as well as existing works never before exhibited in NSW.

Presented free to the public from 28 May – 24 July 2022, the exhibition draws on collective memory and experience, unpacking how the representation and perpetuation of culture, knowledge, and tradition can be transferred through storytelling.

Australian emerging artist Joi Murugavell will unveil her first solo exhibition in seven years in Sydney from 29 April until 2 May 2022. The exhibition, presented by art advisor Sarah Birtles, will be held at Peach Black Gallery in Chippendale.  Titled Finding Mikey, the exhibition features 13 new works by the artist, including five ‘double-mattress-sized’ paintings, five collaged ‘toy paintings’ and a large-scale installation work that capture the spontaneity and humour of life.

Sarah Birtles, who represents the artist in Australia, says Murugavell has gained a strong following in Asia in recent years, exhibiting at major art fairs including ART021 Shanghai, KIAF Korea and Art Taiwan and presenting work with galleries in Taiwan, Korea and China.

Collage features strongly across the vibrant series of paintings by Murugavell whose works weave together stories collected from personal experiences ranging from phrases and symbols, to song lyrics, cartoons and childhood toys, which collectively invite deep contemplation and examination. The installation, featuring two figures; Mikey and Marisol Escobar, is inspired by Marisol’s Dinner Date, 1963, and extends the narrative of the paintings into three dimensional space.

DESASTRES by Marco Fusinato has made its debut in the Australia Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale.  Curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, DESASTRES will be live for the entirety of La Biennale Arte 2022. The work is an invitation for audiences to come together within a high-intensity concentration of energy.

In the installation for DESASTRES, Fusinato uses equipment associated with spectacle as a form of sculpture. The work is unique each day it is initiated and, as it unfolds, it will radically transform the physical experience of each audience member. Fusinato says: “My idea of activating the audience is to remind them that they are alive. That they have a pulse”.

The large-scale, immersive artwork sees Fusinato improvising slabs of noise, saturated feedback and discordant intensities with an electric guitar, triggering a deluge of disparate and disconnected images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The pavilion is simultaneously a de facto studio and a space for research where Fusinato can test cause and effect in real time.

The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms. There is no theme as such, rather the immersion of sound and image is open for the audience to interpret and make sense of. The intent is to create some kind of hallucination, elation in disorientation and exhaustion from confusion.

A new temporary public artwork has been unveiled in Sydney’s Potts Point, as part of the City of Sydney’s Art & About program. Titled ‘Here Lies Your Story’, the work is a text-based mural by Fenella Kernebone installed on the exterior of the Potts Point Hotel that captures the idiosyncratic spirit of one of Sydney’s most diverse, idiosyncratic communities.

On the wall, it stands about 4.5 metres high and 3metres wide, extending a further 2 metres along the ground below. Both sections feature a range of vignettes collated from residents and visitors to the area. Kernebone, best known as a curator and broadcaster, drew on her experience as an interviewer to assemble these stories together. Read an interview with the artist here.

Carriageworks will present a major solo exhibition by acclaimed Australian artist Mel O’Callaghan titled All is Life, which expands on the artist’s continued exploration of the relationship between life and nonlife. Presented free to the public from 23 June to 21 August 2022, the exhibition, which has been curated by Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, will include an ambitious sculptural installation activated by performances, a new sound work, and a two-channel film capturing the sacred ritual Dhalo, shot by the artist on a recent trip to Ambaulim, Goa in India.

Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, Australia’s newest cultural precinct, has opened to the public following the completion of major redevelopment works on the historically significant Pier 2/3 located on the Sydney Harbour foreshore. A premier arts and culture hub, the Precinct is home to nine of the nation’s foremost performing arts companies presenting a vibrant program of musical concerts, theatre performances and public events throughout 2022.

Carriageworks announced today the names of 95 Australian artists from the Greater Sydney region who will participate in CUT N POLISH: Artist Car Boot Sale on Sunday 1 May 2022. Presented in Carriageworks’ Blacksmith’s Workshop, CUT N POLISH is a one-day art car boot sale featuring 62 artist stalls  selling their works directly to the public in a casual, market-style setting.

Established by artists for artists, the project provides the opportunity for visual artists to sell new works, pieces from their back catalogue, collaborations, and artist side projects, direct to the public in a ‘cash and carry’ market model with all sale proceeds going directly and in full to the artists.

Selected by a panel comprising of Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley and Katherine Stone from Carriageworks and leading contemporary artists and project initiators Consuelo Cavaniglia, Jonny Niesche and Brendan Van Hek, the 95 participants represent an exciting selection of cross-generational and culturally diverse artists from recently graduated students to award-winning practitioners.