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Visual art

Yesterday

Glen Le Lievre cartoons for 2025

See all of Glen Le Lievre cartoons for 2025.

Grace Cossington Smith’s oil panting Pittwater, View to Lion Island, c.1930, right, was found inside a frame displaying ???, left, during an inspection at Davidsons auction house.

Hidden painting discovered after 95 years in the dark

When an auction house took the back off a family hand-me-down, it revealed a colourful work by Australia’s second-most-traded female artist.

July

Loribelle Spirovski’s Archibald Prize 2025 finalist, ‘Finger painting of William Barton’, which has now won the People’s Choice award.

The pain behind the Archibald people’s favourite

Loribelle Spirovski suffered an injury that made holding a brush painful. Painting didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton delivered a solution.

The Lime Tree (Yarra River from Kensington Road, South Yarra), 1917, by Frederick McCubbin carries a pre-sale estimate of $600,000 to $800,000 in Leonard Joel’s August 25 auction, A Private Collection of Important Australian Art. 

Are we seeing the decline and fall of Australian Impressionists?

This auction will point to whether the artists whose values were so high for so long have lost their lustre.

From the Gibson Desert, big-name artists at small prices

After years working with remote Aboriginal communities, Ben Danks is selling a collection that includes works by some of the biggest names in Indigenous art.

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Vince Frost

Vince Frost: ‘When everything is digital, print is premium’

The design guru, who started designing in the same year as the launch of AFR Magazine, has added his creative flair to our special anniversary edition.

Architect William Smart.

When Rich Listers want an architect, there’s one man they turn to

William Smart designs houses for those without budget constraints. Designing his own presented a unique challenge.

AFRmag Covers

Three decades of PMs, fashion icons and the odd person headed for jail

The Financial Review’s monthly glossy changed the format for magazines when it arrived in 1995. We look back on its greatest hits, and the occasional near miss.

This 1971 Karuizawa ‘Noh’ single malt Japanese whisky, one of 82 bottles, was estimated at $80,000 to $100,000 at Lawsons but didn’t find a buyer.

Not enough distress: Japanese whisky sale tanks

The SMSF seller of rare whiskies could have put off buyers, but interest in Escher and Turner proves almost infinite.

La Belle Rafaëla, 1927, by Tamara de Lempicka, was the top lot at Sotheby’s in London, selling for £7.5 million.

$15m nude is proof that women are the future of the art world

Pretty much the only good news in a disappointing London sale season was the results for female artists.

AGNSW director Maud Page: “I want to create dwelling spaces where families can come and hang out. I want people from across Sydney to think of us as their second home.”

Meet the woman with NSW’s biggest (and hardest) arts job

Maud Page is the first female to run the Art Gallery Of NSW, but its immediate survival as the costs of a new building bite is what she is dwelling on.

July 12, 2025

David Rowe cartoons for July 2025

David Rowe is a multiple Walkley award-winning cartoonist. He draws a daily political cartoon and one for the Chanticleer column.

A Karuizawa ‘Noh’ single malt Japanese whisky, one of 82 bottles, is estimated at $80,000 to $100,000 in a Lawsons’ auction.

Rare Japanese whisky could be yours for $100,000

The 41-year-old single malt, one of only 82 bottles from the Karuizawa Distillery’s Noh series of 2013, is among 34 bottles being sold from a collector’s super fund.

Artist Khaled Sabsabi, who had his invitation to participate in the Venice Biennale revoked by Creative Australia, with his work at Barangaroo Metro Station in Sydney.

Dumped Venice artist reinstated in stunning backflip

Decision to cancel Khaled Sabsabi based on old artworks depicting terrorism was marred by “missteps, assumptions and missed opportunities”.

Tony Ellwood AM, director of NGV, and Katie Somerville, senior curator of fashion and textiles at the NGV.

From pumpkins to punk: Melbourne’s next blockbuster art show revealed

How does the National Gallery Of Victoria follow last summer’s record-breaking Yayoi Kusama show? With one of fashion’s biggest names.

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June

David Rowe cartoons for June 2025

David Rowe is a multiple Walkley award-winning cartoonist. He draws a daily political cartoon and one for the Chanticleer column.

Mark Gowing in his Newtown studio.

Why this publisher chucked it in after 35 years to become an artist

Mark Gowing was a well-paid service provider for art heavyweights like Roslyn Oxley and Gene Sherman, but in his early 50s, the muse came calling.

Newcastle Art Gallery director Lauretta Morton (left) at the Sydney apartment of Catriona and Simon Mordant, who have gifted 25 works from their collection to the gallery as it prepares to reopen after a $47 million expansion.

Simon Mordant’s biggest gift of artwork is to an unexpected place

One ambitious regional gallery will be a surprise recipient when the veteran banker and wife Catriona gift more than 300 works from storage to world galleries.

Leipzig vocal sextet Sjaella

The shows, concerts, exhibitions and festivals lighting up your July

A violin veteran as you’ve rarely seen him, Adelaide lit up and a dancey alternative to school holiday screentime: all the best shows around the nation this month.

Australia II, painted by businessman Alan Bond while incarcerated, fetched $2196 (including 22 per cent buyer’s premium) at Gibson’s Australian, Maritime and Exploration auction in Melbourne on Monday.

A painting Alan Bond made in prison just sold at auction

The late fraudster’s lawyer put up a painting of the yacht Australia II and was expecting about $300, but it secured a lot more than that.

Original URL: https://www.afr.com/topic/visual-art-1msv