Quentin Sprague is a writer and curator based in Melbourne.
Articles by this author
Ian Potter Museum for Art’s ‘Vertigo Sea’ and ‘I was born in Indonesia’ are very different answers to the same question
What is art for anyway?
The first time I walked into Vertigo Sea at The Ian Potter Museum of Art (until 16 July), a three-channel film by the London-based Ghanaian artist John Akomfrah, it had...
ACCA’s exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art was a long overdue success
After ‘Sovereignty’
The dust settled on Sovereignty, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (ACCA) long overdue survey of First Nations art from south-eastern Australia, a little over six weeks...
The collected wisdom of Patrick Pound and Brook Andrew at NGV
Archives are us
“To collect,” according to Patrick Pound, the New Zealand–born, Melbourne-based artist whose vast archive project The Great Exhibition has recently taken over the ground-floor...
What does it take to transform the National Gallery of Australia into the Palace of Versailles?
A moveable feast
On a Friday morning in late October I met Adam Worrall in the National Gallery of Australia’s members lounge, a quiet, low-ceilinged room on the Level 2 mezzanine of Colin Madigan...
Lynette Wallworth’s ‘Collisions’ brings virtual reality to the Western Desert
Seeing visions
Nyarri Nyarri Morgan was a young man when he witnessed the atomic plume rise above the Western Desert in the 1950s. Like many Martu, he was at the time yet to meet a European, so...
Artist Jan Senbergs prepares for his NGV retrospective
Life’s work
Jan Senbergs sits surrounded by the ephemera of his life’s work: folders of correspondence, press clippings, catalogues and plastic sleeves of 35mm slides that document his five-...
The National Museum of Australia’s ‘Encounters’ and the politics of collection
Bringing them home
“The English took the place without consent.” Harley Coyne, a Noongar man in his late 50s, was speaking to me in early November from Albany, on Western Australia’s southern coast...
The meteoric career of Kaiadilt painter Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda
The extraordinary Mrs Gabori
By any measure, Mrs Gabori’s rise was stellar. When the Kaiadilt artist began painting in 2005 she was aged in her early 80s, already a long-term resident in her community’s old...
Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart (until 13 April 2015)
Matthew Barney’s ‘River of Fundament’
On its publication in 1983, Norman Mailer’s epic Egyptian novel, Ancient Evenings, was widely panned. “Pretentious, unreadable, even incomprehensible” was the consensus. Mailer,...
National Gallery of Victoria’s ‘Melbourne Now’
Melbourne Now, the NGV’s ambitious exhibition of the city’s contemporary art and related disciplines, has been a varied undertaking. This is partly because contemporary art,...
The unlikely collaboration of Paddy Bedford and Tony Oliver
Two painters in the Kimberley
For Paddy Bedford, the day usually began soon after dawn. Tony Oliver, a former Melbourne gallerist who had worked alongside Bedford for close to a decade since arriving in the...
