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Australian artist Rosemary Lee joins Art Wank to discuss the quiet power of observation, the language of drawing, and finding beauty in the everyday.

Awarded the 2025 Dobell Drawing Prize $30,000 acquisitive prize for her work 24–1 (2024), Lee’s meticulously rendered pencil drawing explores the changing urban landscape of Sydney’s Inner West, capturing construction sites, demolition zones and the constant cycle of renewal that shapes contemporary life. Selected from 965 entries, the work impressed judges with its extraordinary detail, visual intensity and nuanced reflection on place and transience.

In this episode, Rosemary talks about her artistic journey, the meditative process of drawing, and why subjects that many people overlook have become a source of endless fascination. From the complexities of gentrification and urban change to the challenges and rewards of maintaining a sustained studio practice, she shares the thinking behind the work that earned one of Australia’s most significant drawing awards.

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In this episode of Art Wank, we sit down with acclaimed Australian artist Joe Furlonger, @joefurlonger one of the country’s most respected and enduring painters of landscape and place.

For more than four decades, Furlonger has built a remarkable career through an unwavering commitment to drawing, observation and the lived experience of the Australian environment. Known for his expressive mark-making and dynamic compositions, his work moves between figuration and abstraction, capturing the vastness, volatility and poetry of the Australian landscape. From floodplains and drought-stricken country to coastal waters and working harbours, Furlonger’s paintings reveal a deep engagement with the rhythms of the natural world. 

Born in Cairns and now based in Samford, Queensland, Furlonger has been a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes on multiple occasions, and his work is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and QAGOMA. His celebrated survey exhibition Horizons continues to tour regional Queensland, introducing new audiences to the breadth of his practice.

We discuss the central role drawing plays in his daily life, the challenges and rewards of maintaining a long artistic career, and the ways landscape painting can become a vehicle for contemplation, memory and human connection. Joe reflects on his relationship with the Australian sublime, his years spent travelling and working in remote regions, and the enduring importance of looking closely at the world around us.

The conversation coincides with Furlonger’s current exhibition, Into the Blue, showing at @defiancegallery from 6–27 June 2026. The exhibition presents powerful new works inspired by coastal Australia, continuing his exploration of landscape as both physical reality and emotional terrain.

This episode offers a rare opportunity to hear from a painter whose work has shaped contemporary Australian landscape painting for generations.

#joefurlonger #art #artpodcast #artist

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In this episode, we speak with Andrew Jensen, founder and director of Fox Jensen, one of Australia's leading contemporary art galleries and Fox Jensen Mccrory, alongside Emma Fox and Sarah Mccrory.

Andrew discusses the evolution of the gallery, from its beginnings to its current presence in both Sydney and New Zealand. We explore the changing landscape of contemporary art, what makes a successful artist gallery relationship, and how a commercial gallery balances artistic vision with the realities of the art market.

The conversation also touches on collecting, the international art scene, the enduring significance of painting, and the role galleries play in supporting artists throughout their careers. Andrew shares insights from decades of experience working closely with established and emerging artists, offering a candid look at the challenges and opportunities facing contemporary art today.

Whether you're an artist, collector, curator, or simply interested in contemporary culture, this episode provides a thoughtful perspective on the business, passion and commitment behind running a leading gallery.

'Andrew Jensen opened the gallery in New Zealand in 1988 and over the course of more than thirty-five years it has set itself aside in terms of its seamless presentation of international work alongside the most considered practices from the region. In early 2011 the gallery expanded to Australia opening a second gallery in Sydney.

Multiple exhibitions by major artists such as Imi Knoebel, Fred Sandback, Tony Oursler, Helmut Federle, Günter Umberg, Winston Roeth, Lawrence Carroll, Elisabeth Vary and Callum Innes altered and enriched the local conditions. These exhibitions continued to provide the basis for an increasingly expansive approach that has seen the curated aspect of the gallery grow. There have been numerous notable projects over the last decade or more including E=MC2, Naked, The Architecture of Colour, Six Degrees of Separation, Points of Orientation, Detox, Melancholia, The Authority of Death, Farben, Saturation, There’s Joy in Repetition, Portrait without a Face, Eros, Permafrost and more recently Raven, Plastic Soul, Terrain, No One’s Rose & Rain. 

The galleries’ programs have developed a welcome richness and energy with the inclusion of a newer generation of international artists including Jan Albers, Mark Francis, Hanns Kunitzberger, Sofie Muller, Erin Lawlor, Liat Yossifor, Koen Delaere, Jane Bustin and Gideon Rubin. Alongside this, artists from the region include Aida Tomescu, Tomislav Nikolic, Matthew Allen, Geoff Thornley, Robert Malherbe, Jenny Topfer, Todd Hunter and Gary McMillan. The galleries are also privileged to hold the Estate of Bill & Pip Culbert.

With the opening of the major new gallery space in Sydney in late 2025 the galleries have both expanded and consolidated its program. In 2026 the galleries are presenting works by celebrated artists Ian Davenport (UK), Paul Czerlitzki (POL), Ingo Meller (GER), Ulrike Schulze (GER), Gerold Millar (GER) and Lucienne O’Mara (UK). 

Fox Jensen, Sydney and Fox Jensen McCrory, Auckland are run in close partnership with its artists by Andrew Jensen, Emma Fox and Sarah McCrory. It participates annually in art fairs whilst remaining deeply committed to its galleries’ programs and to publishing.' - Fox Jensen Website

Thanks for Andrew Jensen and Emma Fox for having us in their home for the converstauon.

Fox jensen Gallery, cnr Brennan &, McEvoy St, Alexandria NSW 2015

Fox Jensen Mcrorym, 10 Putiki St, Gtey Lynn, AKL 1021

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In this episode of Art Wank, we speak with Mason Kimber, a Sydney based artist represented by N.Smith Gallery and Sophie Gannon Gallery. Kimber’s practice moves between textural painting, sculptural relief and installation, exploring the relationship between architecture, memory and surface.

We discuss how childhood experiences wandering through his father’s Perth nightclubs shaped his fascination with interiors, texture and built environments, and how these memories continue to inform his paintings today. Kimber reflects on expanding the language of painting through moulding, casting and framing, creating works that sit somewhere between painting, object and architecture.

The conversation also touches on studying fresco painting during his residency at the British School at Rome, completing a PhD focused on expanded painting practices, and balancing studio work with teaching at the National Art School and UNSW Art & Design.

A conversation about memory, materiality, architecture and the possibilities of painting beyond the flat surface.

Magenta House

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Lustre is a new temporary exhibition that explores the Allied campaigns in Greece and Crete in 1941 through the works of contemporary artists who walked in their footsteps in 2025.

Lustre Force was the code name for the combined Australian, New Zealand and British army units deployed to protect Greece from Nazi attack in 1941. The Allied defence of Greece was overwhelmed in three and a half weeks in April 1941 and in May, Crete fell to a Nazi airborne invasion in just ten days.

To record those heroic but doomed campaigns, Australia and New Zealand sent war artists and a photographer. 

Eighty-five years later, artists from Australia and New Zealand retraced their footsteps, walking the battlefields and visiting the cemeteries where the men and women of Lustre Force and their German foe lie.

Lustre showcases the impressions they made of the impact of that journey. Some of the images show that the land and its people have recovered over time; others reveal that some scars take longer to fade.

The exhibition opens on 15 May 2026 and is in the Memorial’s Auditorium on the Lower Floor. The Memorial is open every day, 9am to 5pm. Please note that access to the exhibition is dependent on the Auditorium’s use for education and other programs, so we encourage you to call the Memorial in advance on (02) 8262 2900.

Entry is free

Artists: Amanda Penrose Hart, Euan Mcleoud, Joanna Logue, Alan Daniel Jones, Deirdre Bean, Riste Andrievski, Angelika Androutsopolous, Michael Bradfield, Michelle Hiscock, Steve Lopes, Natalie OConnor and Rodney Pople

Historian: Brad Manera, the Senior Historian and Curator of the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney

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Gary has a chat with artist Julie Nicholson about her show, Nostalgia, opening May 21st at CBD Gallery in Sydney.

Julie has recently exhibited with CBD Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair (NZ), and her work has been widely recognised in national awards such as the Paddington Art Prizre and the Muswellbrook, and held in private collections in Australia and overseas. She co-hosts the popular arts podcast, Art Wank.

Her duo solo exhibition, Nostalgia, stems from a sense of homesickness after moving from the UK to Australia at the age of 23. A deep sense of nostalgia has shaped her life, and only recently did she discover that nostalgia was once considered a disease. The works in this exhibition sit within that tension, posing the question of whether nostalgia is something that nurtures us, or something that holds us back.

Many of the canvases in the exhibition are split across multiple panels, reflecting the fractured experience of trying to locate familiarity within a foreign landscape. Moments of recognition such as sketching in Berrima in the Southern Highlands, where the landscape can feel momentarily like home are interrupted by distinctly Australian elements, like a palm tree or native plant, which jolt her back into the awareness of distance and displacement.

Julie has also titled many of the works using Old English words for landscape elements—such as weald, meaning forest. This reflects her interest in etymology and the evolution of language over time. Just as words shift, fall out of use, and take on new meanings, her understanding of the Australian landscape has also changed. Language, like memory, holds a connection to the past while continually adapting to the present, mirroring her experience of navigating place, identity, and belonging.

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Brett McMahon is a Newcastle-based painter whose work explores the structures and rhythms of the natural and built environment. Represented by Nanda Hobbs, McMahon has built a significant practice spanning painting, drawing and installation.

His work is known for its distilled, abstract language, bold lines, shifting geometries and a strong sense of spatial tension. Drawing from the coastal bush, industrial architecture and lived experience of place, his paintings sit somewhere between observation and reconstruction, where landscape becomes structure.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, McMahon has held over 30 solo exhibitions and exhibited widely across Australia and internationally. His work is held in public, corporate and private collections across Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States. 

In this conversation, we talk about painting as a way of thinking, the role of environment in shaping visual language, and how a practice evolves over time without losing its core concerns. We also get into scale, material and the push and pull between control and intuition in the studio.

Brett is represented by Nanda Hobbs in Sydney

Brett's show at Gosford Art Gallery Understory, opens 16th May 2026

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Joe Frost is an Australian artist. He was born in Sydney in 1974 and has exhibited consistently since 1999.

His visual thinking evolved in the urban environment and he is, in a sense, a local painter. Sydney’s remnant industrial areas were the subject of his earliest drawings and paintings and he has made extensive series of work in response to the western reaches of Sydney Harbour, the city’s CBD and the green, suburban precinct of Denistone. At times he has worked en plein air but his renditions of place have more usually been filtered through memory in the studio, where his approach to painting is improvisatory and layered. 

Over 25 years his process of finding-in-paint has come to manifest a great variety of subject matters, including public places, garden spaces, domestic objects and human figures in social situations. Some paintings land upon abstraction and are no less concerned with the matter of recognition: what is presented on the picture plane and what does the mind make of it? In all of Joe Frost's work a process is in play, whereby meaningful visual structure is divined from the flux of experience.

Joe is represented by Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney

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Sally Anderson’s work is strongly influenced by her personal life, including her experiences of home, motherhood and relationships, as well as second hand experiences of landscapes. She explores how meaning and memory are held, stored and carried.

Born in Lismore, Sally Anderson began studying Visual Art at Southern Cross University before moving to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. She has been a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize. In 2014 she took part in a residency with the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2017 she won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship through the Art Gallery of NSW and completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

These ideas continue in her upcoming exhibition at N Smith Gallery, opening on 9 April. Called Holding Pattern, River Hug, it builds on her interest in cycles, care, and repetition, with new paintings that shift between abstract and more realistic forms.

Sally is represented by N.Smith Gallery (Sydney, Australia) and Edwina Corlette Gallery (Brisbane, Australia). 

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