LOWBROW
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LOWBROW •
As I enter the singular room of Craft Victoria and grab an exhibition sheet under the white spotlights, my first instinct is to look at the artworks poking out of the ground. The annual show Fresh!, which has been running for 33 years, opened on Valentine’s Day at Craft Victoria. Like a geographical map, many of the works are spread out on the ground. I keep my head down; I’m an explorer that needs to make my way through the jungle of metal and glass. The artworks are either directly on the floor or lay on rustic wooden tables, and the one-dimensional works are attached without framing onto the wall. They are all interacting with the space given to them, directly in contact with either the floor or the wall. I feel like the curation strongly mirrors the common conveyed ideas of the eight graduates in the exhibition. The works are all revolving around connection; either between different materials, or within family, traditions, and queer communities.
Though hardly the first event of the year, the Melbourne Art Fair marks the end of summer, a back to school for the art scene in the city. It’s a key time to take the temperature of the market, see what is in vogue (abstract expressionism always) and out of favour (photography, with two notable exceptions). The Melbourne Art Fair is not lowbrow, though I certainly felt I was wandering through opening night.
Walking down High St, the gnarled hands in the window were my first clue I was in the right place. The second was the canary yellow paste-ups papering the side of the building. At 83 High St in Prahran, an old, abandoned office building has been transformed into an art-filled haven, office-standard concrete and carpet notwithstanding. The hands were simultaneously flipping me off and beckoning me in, and were a great taster for what I would find inside of the fair, which for 2026 is aptly titled “Lust for Life.” There was never a time in the show that any one artist’s practice could have been confused with another. The curation was such that each inclusion was singular, yet the works spoke to each other but never repeated what the other was saying.
George Paton Gallery is currently hosting two solo shows; Translucences by Soyo Paek and Purity and Danger by Leena O’Luu. The gallery, situated in the University of Melbourne’s Arts and Culture building at the Parkville campus, is run by the university’s student union (UMSU). Work is chosen via a proposals process and only current Uni Melb students can apply. George Paton gallery fills a strange niche at the university, in that it doesn’t feel like a student gallery, and that it’s so separate from UniMelb’s Southbank VCA campus - which is where all of the creative arts students are situated. George Paton feels more aligned with the professional side of the university, rather than the student side, even though it’s definitely student work on display.
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To launch the new Lowbrow Art Book Club (tentatively titled Bottom Shelf, but we’re taking suggestions), which will be coming to you all on the last Tuesday of every month, I couldn’t think of a better exhibition to see this week than A Library of Libraries at Blindside. My first time at the gallery’s new North Melbourne location, I was welcomed in by the curator Grey Dear, and shown around the show that is a collection of collections. I wasn’t able to make it on opening night (like Charlotte was), but snuck in a day earlier to spend some time in the space reading a few of the many books on display.