John Hardaker Archive

Once again, the Biennale has taken over Sydney, adding hyper-excitement, colour and zing to a number of venues around our already zinging, parti-coloured city. The 2014 Biennale curator, Juliana Engberg, has situated what she terms the festival’s more “liminal, libidinous and liquious” …

Outside it was a grey, hostile, traffic snarled, drizzly Sydney evening but here in the City Recital Centre it was warm, golden and all at peace. I felt all my angst, peak hour jitters and parking station traumas drop away like moldy …

Conceptual art divides people as fiercely and clearly as it divided the Old from the New early in the 20th  Century. Art that can be an idea, or a mere instruction or a thought – often independent of a material resolution or …

Australia and America share many similarities historically. Both are young countries, both are built on a pioneering spirit, and both were quick to create their own mythologies, royalties and national characters from the very start. Taking in the Art Gallery of New …

Whenever I hear the saxophone used in classical orchestral music – after years of digging the instrument in jazz and rock with all its attendant growls, snarls, bleeds and honks – it sounds like a completely different instrument to its earthier-music sibling. Its …

Drawing has often been seen as the poor cousin of painting. Smaller, more spindly, less colourful – drawing and graphic arts such as printmaking, by their nature, can lack painting’s drama and spectacle. But graphic art has its own power and charm. …

It took me three attempts to actually find the new Bill Henson exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This has nothing to do with the AGNSW’s signage or the directions I was given by their ever-helpful staff. It’s not …

The current major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is Sydney Moderns. It has the subtitle Art for a New World, and the pictures shown – over 180 works by many of Australia’s most significant artists of the 1920s …

This year’s Vivid festival again brought Sydney alive with art. We had Kraftwerk and the parti-coloured Opera House; we had Wagner-a-la-multimedia and Johnny Cupcakes. But one of the most striking and jaw-dropping works presented under the Vivid umbrella was ‘test pattern ’, …

In all the arts – music and film especially – many sins can be forgiven if a work has heart. The Beatles’ chirpier songs, The Sound Of Music, most Country music, Sly Stallone’s original Rocky – all beloved by millions, and who …