What the art?! A 2024 wrap-up

It feels like it has been a huge year… like the biggest year ever! Or maybe it has just felt like it has gone super fast. I swear I blinked in September and now it is the final countdown until Christmas dinner and fireworks on new year’s eve.

At New England Regional Art Museum, we had our final opening night, launched our summer exhibitions and have switched to planning mode for next year. So, as we are wrapping up 2024, I thought I would use this column to look back on some of the big art things that have happened, here in New England and beyond. Let’s start local. NERAM had an excellent program of exhibitions in 2024 (if I do say so myself 😊). My personal top three for the year:

Canyons showed a stunning series of works by Ebony Russell, known for her totally original technique of combing ceramic sculpture with the practice of cake decorating to make work that is at once temptingly pretty and conceptually rigorous. In Canyons Russel constructed small craggy mountains from layers of piped porcelain, rising from a piped term or a phrase that was used as an endearing pet name or description of how the artist  “should” behave to obtain parental acceptance and love. I absolutely adored this exhibition, it felt reverent, sumptuous, with an undercurrent of menace… and of course there was the surprise interplay between the sculpture and the mirrored plinth that provided a beautiful moment of revelation to those paying attention.

Neerja Peters’ artwork fuses geometric abstraction with mystical exploration, creating a universal visual language through vibrant colors, abstract shapes, and symbolic forms. Her deliberate use of geometry transcends aesthetics, tapping into the spiritual dimensions of art to evoke unity, balance, and harmony. This approach invites viewers into a meditative state, accessing the sublime. Ley Lines was Peters’ first Australian exhibition, showcasing works from 2020–2024. Inspired by the concept of ley lines – mystical alignments of landmarks with spiritual significance – the collection explored how we navigate space, time, and the unseen forces shaping our sense of place and self.

I am irresistibly drawn to colour and have a predilection for abstract art, so I am absolutely thrilled that NERAM is currently showing Inner/Space, a survey of work spanning 47 years of practice by one of Australia’s leading contemporary abstract artists, Helen Eager. Eager is a masterful colourist, a fascination and discipline that has been woven through her entire oeuvre, from her first lithograph prints as a student at the South Australian School of Art, to her decades long focus on geometric abstraction explored across several streams of practice including painting, drawing and video – always an unwavering dedication to the expressive possibilities of colour. Inner/Space provides a rare opportunity to explore Eager’s artistic progression over time – to see the connections between disparate bodies of work, as they evolve and are refined through disciplined experimentation and experience. It is a wonderful exhibition (continuing at NERAM until 2 February).

From the Art Gallery of NSW, my favourite exhibition was Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum. I loved seeing such a comprehensive showing of Dumbrell’s work, it was a revelation of sorts. I thought the show was brilliantly curated, showing a progression of process, experimentation and practice. I left with a great appreciation for Drumbell who is surely one, if not the, most important Australian hard-edge and optical artist. Of course I love this kind of abstract art, with its colour, movement and rhythm (you may have noticed a pattern emerging in my selection) but acknowledge it’s not for everyone. This show might have converted some people, it was so good.

White Rabbit Gallery is always on my must-see list of galleries when I am in Sydney and Laozi’s Furnace was another exceptional showing that likened the artists’ conceptual and material experimentation with alchemy. I was particularly enthralled by Jiang Pengyi’s Trace Series 2015-16 and could clearly see a process of transmutation in its making.

Up in sunny Queensland, I would have to say that I was absolutely seduced by the drama, opulence and ethereal beauty of Iris van Herpen Sculpting the Senses exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art. Sometimes I lament the prevalence of blockbuster fashion exhibitions, in that they divert attention and certainly funding away from visual art that is more challenging, critiquing elements of our society, than the spectacle of haute couture. Even Jean Paul Gaultier stated, “Fashion is not art. Never”. But there is a conceptual and material rigour to van Herpen’s designs, focused on how fundamental nature is to life on earth and a deep commitment to experimentation that really transitions her designs to be sculptures that can be worn. The exhibition also included artwork from the GoMA collection in a very thoughtful way.

International discoveries

I was  very fortunate to be able to do some travelling this year and visit some outstanding international museums and exhibitions. In India, my favourite exhibition was Shakekthu Shalpaka, a solo exhibition by Manjunath Kamath at Bikaner House. The work is at once connected to ancient traditions while being wholly contemporary, and beautiful. In Scotland I loved Unicorn at the Perth Museum, which included unicorn horns (well narwhal horns), paintings, bestiaries and a range of other objects alongside seven newly-commissioned artworks exploring the unicorn as Scotland’s national animal and a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.

In Spain, my favourite art day was spent wandering through the Guggenheim Bilbao… I mean talk about extra! I have so many thoughts on the architecture and the collection, but for now I’ll just say that I was thrilled and overwhelmed (in a good way) by the epic scale and in seeing all these contemporary art superstars living up to and surpassing the demands of Gehry’s building design. My favs were Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time 1994-2005, these are artworks that need to be experienced to be fully understood. I walked away being so much more of fan of Serra’s than before my visit. Also, Jenny Holzer’s Installation for Bilbao 1997/2017, I love time based work that captures and keeps your attention, and Jeff Koons’ Puppy 1992. Love or hate Koons, this 8.2 metre tall sculpture of puppy made of flowers is absolutely charming.

One of the big stories in international art was the sale of Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual work Comedian, a banana duct taped to the wall, for $9.57 million at an auction in New York. The collector, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, proceeded to eat the work.

See you next year art lovers.

PS – Five exhibitions I am looking forward to seeing over summer: The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at QAGoMA, Cao Fei: My City is Yours at AGNSW, XSWL at White Rabbit Gallery, Megan Cope: Contemporary Queensland Glass at Artisan and Paradise Gloss – Next Edition at Side Gallery.