Anna Schwartz Gallery will present an exhibition featuring new work and a four-stage installation by leading Australian artist Mike Parr from 1 May – 31 July 2021.

Parr will transform the Gallery throughout the three-month exhibition over a series of four blind performances, creating new installation work. These performances follow on from Towards an Amazonian Black Square, 2019 which was included in Mike Parr’s solo exhibition The Eternal Opening at Carriageworks and Towards a Black Square, 2019, presented by Detached Cultural Organisation in association with Dark Mofo.

In addition to the blind performances, the exhibition will include video, painting, photography and sculpture. The static works will articulate the separate stages of the exhibition.

Image: Mike Parr, Towards an Amazonian Black Square, 2019, performance, Carriageworks, Sydney. Cinematographer: Gotaro Uematsu.Co-performer: Glenn Thompson. Photo: Mark Pokorny. © Mike Parr. Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery

A major survey of contemporary Australian art, The National 2021: New Australian Art, opened today across three of Sydney’s leading cultural institutions, the Art Gallery of New South  Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks and Museum of Contemporary  Art Australia (MCA), presenting 39 new commissioned projects by established, mid-career, emerging artists and artist collectives from across the nation.

The third iteration in a series of biennial surveys, originally launched in 2017, The  National 2021 showcases the varied and vital work being made by Australian artists,  in urban and regional centres, as well as remote communities, by artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. With three distinct exhibitions developed by four curators, the 2021 iteration presents new and recent works which embody themes of collaboration and intergenerational learning, and planetary responsibility.

Image: Zan Wimberley

Heide Museum of Modern Art has opened the first career survey of Ukrainian-Australian artist Stanislava Pinchuk from 20 March to 20 June 2021. Presented in Heide Modern, Stanislava Pinchuk: Terra Data will bring together for the first time more than 40 key works from Pinchuk’s practice plotting the changing topographies of war and conflict zones to explore how the landscape holds a memory of past political events.

Born and raised in Ukraine, and now based between Naarm (Melbourne) and Sarajevo (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Stanislava Pinchuk is one of Australia’s most exciting contemporary artists. Beginning with recording the Ukrainian Civil War, in her home country, she has since made large bodies of architectural survey work centred around the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zones, and the Calais ‘Jungle’ Migrant Camp in France.

Image: Clytie Meredith

Contemporary cultural precinct HOTA, Home of the Arts has today unveiled a major new outdoor artwork by Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran at the entrance of the new HOTA Gallery. The $60.5 million HOTA Gallery will open on the Gold Coast on 8 May and will be Australia’s largest public gallery outside a capital city.

Commissioned by Melbourne Art Foundation (MAF) and HOTA, Sri-Lankan born, Sydney based artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran has created a monumental six-metre high sculpture presented at the lower ground entrance to the Gallery. Predominantly composed of bronze, Nithiyendran has combined a range of materials including concrete, neon and fibreglass to create a multi-coloured avatar reflecting the vibrancy of the HOTA Gallery building. Holding a smiling neon companion and standing on a geometric plinth, this is Nithiyendran’s largest sculpture to date and the artist’s first ambitious work in the public domain. This significant artwork will welcome visitors inside the Gallery with outstretched arms and expressive and commanding tones.

Pictured: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran with his sculpture Double-sided avatar with blue figure, 2021. Photo by Alex Chomicz.

The first survey in Melbourne for twenty years of eminent Australian artist Robert Owen will be presented by Heide Museum of Modern Art from 6 March to 23 May 2021. Blue Over Time will explore Owen’s 60-year career, encompassing his work from the 1960s and 1970s living in Greece and London, as well as featuring new and more recent paintings and sculptural installations.

Situated in Heide’s main galleries, the exhibition will present over thirty key works including a new iteration of the large- scale wall work Afterglow, made especially for the Heide space.

Grounded in geometry and abstraction, Owen’s striking works are inspired by his wide-ranging interests—encompassing philosophy and psychology, science and mathematics, music and literature—and reflect his life-long curiosity about the world. Underpinning his practice is a poetic and intuitive exploration of the expressive potential of light, colour and space. Through key works and a rich archival display, the exhibition Blue Over Time presents major themes, such as the intersection of art and science in Owen’s work, and his long engagement with colour as a tool to express the inexpressible.

Image: Clytie Meredith

Articulate will participate in First Sight, a first of its kind trailblazing mentorship program specifically designed to develop and promote the careers of emerging First Nations photographers.

Developed by Head On Foundation’s artistic director Moshe Rosenzveig OAM in con-sultation with First Nations photographer Michael Jalaru Torres, the program will bring together Indigenous emerging photographers from all around the country, culminating in a final exhibition as part of Head On Photo Festival 2021 in November. Six participants will be selected to exhibit at the Festival Hub and the work of all participants in the program will also be shown in an onscreen slideshow presentation as part of the Festival.

This collaborative mentorship includes a series of invaluable online sessions with industry-leading speakers and mentors to help take the participants’ photography to the next level.

Image caption: Michael Jalaru Torres, ‘Wirriya (happy)’, 2019. Artist shows with Cooee Art Gallery.

The Sydney Fringe has announced a new partnership with 5 Eliza Ltd to enable the launch of their pop-up venue FRINGE HQ Newtown. Taking over the historic ballroom at 5 Eliza Street, the venue will be activated from April-December 2021, and will play a vital role in the Covid recovery for the independent arts sector.

The Sydney Fringe has long been championing the need for more affordable, accessible and importantly non-curated performance space in Sydney. The project Fringe HQ was created in 2018 as a way for the organisation, best known as the presenters of the largest independent arts festival in NSW The Sydney Fringe Festival, to work with their Government and provide sector partners to activate underutilised space for performance.

The venue opens at a time when the sector fears losing many of its dedicated independent performance venues due to the impacts endured from the Covid 19 pandemic. This new venue and partnership provides the Sydney Fringe with the opportunity to further their research into viable business models for venue management for the independent sector, building on the valuable work published in 2018 An Anthology of Space: Activating unused and underutilised space for the creative industries and performing arts sectors of NSW.

The Fringe HQ Newtown public program will be announced in the coming weeks.

Image Courtesy Sydney Fringe