Connie Augoustinos

Vault spoke to New York based artist Theresa Chromati about the practice of painting, developing personal iconographies and placing herself at the centre.

Vault looks at the work of Salman Toor, who draws on art history and his deep love of painting to create compelling images that ruminate on the artist’s experience as a queer man living between two cultures.

Shaun Gladwell’s latest artistic offering stretches and strains against both creative and physical boundaries. His work is subtended by a singular commitment that willingly sacrifices Gladwell’s body at the altar of artistic vision. VAULT sat down with Gladwell to understand what his art takes from him and what it gives back.

There is a physicality in paintings by James Drinkwater also evident in footage of him at work in the studio. He attacks his surface with thrown paint, hits it with rags, slices with the palette knife and scrubs frenetically with fists. When he turns the painting upside down or on its side and declares it finished, there is a kind of head spin and theatrical presentation that takes Drinkwater’s aesthetic into a subject matter that is driven by his life.

By refashioning the language of abstraction, artist Imogen Taylor uses painting as a tool of self-understanding, functioning as a form of queer storytelling and solidarity.

Artist Danie Mellor finds connection to his maternal Indigenous heritage through historical photography. Steve Dow speaks with the artist who turns colonialist images into meditations on the past, present and future.

The Covid-19-delayed survey by acclaimed French artist Camille Henrot is her first to be presented in Australia. Featuring key works from 2011 to 2019, it also marks the exhibition debut of a suite of drawings from the ongoing System of Attachment series. A significant monograph will accompany the show, published in conjunction with Hatje Cantz.

Photo essay

AULT speaks to Dutch designer and visionary Iris van Herpen about her multi- disciplinary couture practice bridging fashion, art and science, and why her latest collection offers hope for a rebirth through our complex relationship with nature.

Graeme and Mabie Briggs have been collecting art in one way or another for over 30 years, and now have one of the largest and most comprehensive private collections of contemporary Latin American art in the world. Driven be a love of art from the conceptual to the painterly, for Graeme and Mabie the act of collecting is one of connection and joy.