Curated Highlights: Rachel Griffiths' Selection from Spring1883
Rachel Griffiths is a content maker working internationally as an actor, executive producer and creator of audience seeking purpose led content. She completed three years of Fine Art at Melbourne and Monash University while studying drama. As a distinguished actor Rachel has been awarded a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards for her work in film and television.
Rachel is the daughter of and wife to an artist and together with her husband Andrew Taylor, is a passionate art collector and actively involved in Australia's contemporary arts community. Rachel has been a patron of the Sydney Contemporary art fair and the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and currently sits on the board of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne. Recently she has brought her passion for art to her factual television series 'Finding the Archibald', exploring the 100 year history of the Archibald Prize. She has a follow up series in development where she hopes to bring bigger audiences to engage with art.
Rachel believes strongly that "art fairs are a great non threatening way to introduce more people to contemporary art in a non high brow and egalitarian (non curated) way.”
'This work is somehow COVID resonant – I find it as strangely comforting and genuinely fresh as a Grateful Dead album. It's just outstanding picture making – distinct, personal language and epic in its ambition. You feel an old school modern master here, standing on the shoulders of 20th century art movements, on the precipice of post-modernism with the draftsmanship confidence to shape a new reality.'
'The work jumps out in its humility – and confidence. McKenna is not reaching for cool but finds a place that feels authentic and masterful that leaves you wondering why all the cool kids try so hard.'
'Who doesn't want to see the very idea of a Red-White-Blue bag beautifully resolved as a statement of visibility and humanity. It's also a damn pretty picture.'
'I love this new series of Michael Cook – a little gutsier than some of his more lyrical series. I can feel the residue of his epic Marbo series in this work. The scale of these works is perfect and having seen them in all sorts of interiors – domestic and commercial – they are wonderful to live with while they challenge our consciousness as we pass them daily.'
'Because living with a Christian Thompson is less time consuming than refreshing his brilliant funny Insta account 7 times a day – while still bringing beauty, joy and playfulness and challenging the clichés and the unexcused from national identity.'
'This is a big statement piece that will anchor a room. I love Kate's manga princess cool – like living with a room tattoo that is a brilliant pictorial synthesis of personal iconography in large charismatic objects that are not shy and say turn up the music and blow these lockdowns up and start feasting.'
'I just really liked these paintings – they are wild and untamed with great surface, gorgeous colour... and unselfconscious. They feel like there is no painter, just the painting. A break from the trend.'
I'd love to see these enigmatic cinematic works in the flesh – carrying the sense memory of Gerhard Richter chanelled through Scorsese. They evoke the warmth of family Super 8 movies found in the attic, while somehow provoking an unsettled and unresolved question of the events/relationships depicted.'
– Rachel Griffiths
