EDITOR’S NOTE
Change as reorientation underpins many of the articles in this issue of Artist Profile. While the most significant shifts may seem dramatic, they occur through gradual deviations: from object to process, from individual output to collective knowledge, and from fixed histories towards more complex and contested understandings of place.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Kirtika Kain’s extraordinary paintings. In his cover profile, Justin Paton traces a practice embedded in history but increasingly shaped by relinquishing control. Kain’s tar, wax, hessian, gold, plaster and copper and other materials carry histories of labour, exclusion, survival and endurance. Paton highlights the movement of accumulation in her early works, towards newer processes of peeling, erosion and removal, suggesting that Kain’s emphasis on destruction can itself become generative. Her use of materials resist intention, forcing the works elsewhere. In this sense, change is not imposed upon the paintings but discovered through them.
John Carty presents reorientation in Cliff Reid’s paintings as a movement between traditions, mediums and ways of seeing. Drawing on Ngaanyatjarra traditions, Reid explained inherited forms through painting. His movement between abstraction and figuration, rock art, shield designs and narrative imagery opened new possibilities for Ngaanyatjarra and desert art. Carty draws attention to how Reid, through his art making, was able to reorient familiar symbolic systems to enable Ngaanyatjarra traditions to be translated across cultures, time and place.
Lucy Stranger’s review of Nike Savvas’ Purple Haze at Orange Regional Gallery offers another form of reorientation, asking us to reconsider how landscape is seen and remembered. Stranger observes how Savvas renders the familiar pastoral landscape of Paterson’s Curse to an installation of 30,000 suspended spheres, turning recognition into optical uncertainty. Stranger also notes how Savvas reminds us that place is never fixed; it changes as perception, memory and context change.
Khaled Sabsabi’s presentation at the 61st La Biennale di Venezia positions change as reorientation: a shifting between inner and outer worlds, self and collective, contemplation and encounter. Michelle Chanique’s review of Sabsabi’s installations conference of one’s self and khalil considers how the artist’s ability to redirect perception without abandoning the familiar and creating spaces in which viewing becomes an embodied experience.
Justene Williams’ practice is defined by continual reorientation, redirecting lived experience, popular culture and art history into new forms. Brad Buckley’s profile essay on Williams presents a perspective on the artist that gives a fresh account of her performance, technology, modernism, and everyday life.
Sebastian Goldspink profile on Shaun Gladwell is a delightful read that begins when they first met in their mid-teens. A component of Man on Fire: Visions of Nebuchadnezzar, 2026, Goldspink explores Gladwell’s masterpiece, A Nebuchadnezzar Cycle, 2026, which frames change as reorientation rather than transformation. Goldspink explains Gladwell’s central concern of movement, embodiment and exile. In Man on Fire, Gladwell’s figure enters Arthur Boyd’s terrain, turning familiar ideas towards new histories and meanings.
Beyond individual practices, reorientation is evident in China’s private museum and gallery sector. Closures and restructures reveal the limits of a model built on rapid expansion, property investment and private capital. Institutions are now reconsidering scale, governance, funding and public engagement. Lansheng Zhang’s essay and Duro Jovicic’s interview with Shanghai gallerist Pearl Lam discuss how change is not simply contraction but recalibration.
These and many more articles in Artist Profile suggest that change in the visual art is rarely a clean break with what came before. It is a turning of the gaze and a willingness to look again. Reorientation may be slower, but it can be more consequential, allowing artists, institutions and audiences to carry histories forward while remaining open to where they might lead next.
Many thanks to all our contributors, advertisers and subscribers for making our seventy-sixth issue of Artist Profile possible.
Kon Gouriotis, Editor
CONTENTS
ISSUE
Issue: Recalibrating China’s Private Art Museums and Galleries by Lansheng Zhang
COVER FEATURE
Kirtika Kain: The Intelligence of Materials by Justin Paton
PROFILES
Tony Costa: Beauty is not enough by Nicholas Tsoutas
Shaun Gladwell: Man on Fire by Sebastian Goldspink
Kirsteen Pieterse: Between Earth and Edifice by Elli Walsh
Derek Ogbourne: The Eye Remembers by Jack Howard
Justene Williams: A Dancing Queen by Brad Buckley
David Collins: The Landscape of Abstraction by Rhonda Davis
Elizabeth Day: Infinite presence and ambiguities by H.R. Hyatt-Johnston
INSIGHT
Poem: New Hope’s Black Pit by Bob Brown
Poster: Save Our Pool by Jon Campbell
Process: Radical Survival by Phil James
Interview: Pearl Lam: Redefining Contemporary Art Through Cultural Dialogue by Duro Jovicic
Tribute: Béla Tarr: the sound of the dead by Aleks Wansbrough
Essay: Cliff Reid: a lyrical glimpse by John Carty
Essay: Euan Macleod’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell by Joe Frost
Essay: A candy shop for artists: The Kenneth E. Tyler Collection by Bronwyn Watson
Essay: The Long View: Growing an art ecosystem by Louise Martin-Chew
Essay: Collective Unlearning by Tessa Zettel and Jennifer Hamilton
Essay: Fridays at Cicada by Steve Lopes
Essay: One of Everything: Gorillas, Fish Nets and Erin Murphy by Tai Mitsuji
Essay: Spaces in the Margins and the Reluctant Utopian by Nikos Papastergiadis and Vasif Kortun
Essay: Salvatore Zofrea’s Day Cycle by Sasha Grishin
Essay: The Art of Gathering: Fowlers Gap and the Australian Artist Camp by Solomiya Sywak
Essay: Light it Up by Sarah Hetherington
Review: Listen rather than declare: La Biennale di Venezia Arte, 2026 by Michelle Chanique
Review: The architecture of unconcealment: exploring Mona’s new wing by Lucy Hawthorne
Review: Impressions and Impressionism: A Collector’s Delight by Alan Krell
Review: Beaming through Cartier by Amélie Blanc
Review: This Moment, Filtered: The White Rabbit Collection at HOTA by Bradley Vincent
Review: Do prayers see their return address as the destination: Leonard Brown – Painting the Celestial by Nathan Shepherdson
Book Review: Exposure: A photographic memoir by Greg Weight by Juliet Darling
Review: The MIGHT and MAGNITUDE of Nike Savvas by Lucy Stranger
Discovery: Aaron William Kennedy: Mirida soaring by Judith Blackall
Short story: Misguided Again by Nola Farman
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.
Artist Profile Issue 76 was published on 27 August 2026
