Sophie Knezic

Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar and visual artist, who works between practice and theory. Sophie’s writing has been published in Broadsheet Journal, Evental Aesthetics, Memo Review, Art + Australia and Art Monthly Australasia, and she is a regular contributor to Frieze and Australian Book Review. Sophie currently lectures in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA, University of Melbourne and in Art History, Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University.

'Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium: Turbulence, curvature, and flux' by Sophie Knezic

ABR Arts • 22 November 2022

Barbara Hepworth, Eidos 1947, National Gallery of Victoria

‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves ... (read more)

‘Light: Works from Tate’s Collection: The power of illumination’ by Sophie Knezic

ABR Arts • 12 July 2022

The allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic represents Western metaphysics’ defining narrative on the nature of light. In this famous fable of shackled prisoners, humankind is confined to a realm of falsity and shadows from which they can only escape by breaking free into the light of day, where the power of illumination reveals the truth of the world. Without overt reference to this foundat ... (read more)

‘Queer: Reappraising the NGV’s heteronormative assumptions’ by Sophie Knezic

ABR Arts • 29 March 2022

We all know that emancipatory drives in the late twentieth century dislodged the hegemonic politics of social normativity through the movements of second wave feminism, civil rights, and gay activism, but it’s worth remembering that some rights took longer than others. Homosexuality was only fully decriminalised in Australia in 1997 (Tasmania being the last state to do so); same-sex marriages we ... (read more)

Sophie Knezic reviews 'Buried Not Dead' by Fiona McGregor

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 22 December 2021

‘Wasn’t sexual expression a principal motivation of gay and queer dancefloors … Isn’t that the freedom we were fighting for? To be kinky dirty fuckers, without shame; to not sanitise ourselves in the bid for equality?’ So exhorts DJ Lanny K in 2013, reflecting on his time spinning discs at down-and-out pubs in ungentrified Surry Hills in the mid-1990s as part of Sydney’s fomenting quee ... (read more)

'NGV Triennial 2020' (National Gallery of Victoria)

ABR Arts • 04 January 2021

In Giambattista Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra (1743–44) – a jewel in the NGV’s collection of eighteenth-century art – a dining table shows the Egyptian queen Cleopatra facing the Roman consul Mark Antony, her hand elegantly clasping a pearl earring that she is about to drop into a flute glass filled with vinegar, which she will subsequently drink. In doing so, the sheer value of the ... (read more)

Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines (National Gallery of Victoria)

ABR Arts • 03 December 2019

In Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines, the National Gallery of Victoria presents a double portrait of the late, iconic, New York-based artists Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) and Keith Haring (1958–90), becoming the first public museum to place their careers in direct dialogue. The retrospective presents many of both artists’ signature works. The vibrant juxtaposition creates ... (read more)

Sophie Knezic reviews 'Present Tense: Anna Schwartz Gallery And Thirty-Five Years Of Contemporary Australian Art' by Doug Hall

November 2019, no. 416 • 23 October 2019

When invited by Morry Schwartz, Anna’s husband and proprietor of Schwartz Publishing, which owns Black Inc., to write an account of the Anna Schwartz Gallery (ASG), Doug Hall initially declined but changed his mind after realising that it would enable him to write with a fresh perspective, having returned to Melbourne after twenty years as director of Queensland Art Gallery. The result, Present ... (read more)

Escher X nendo | Between Two Worlds (National Gallery of Victoria)

ABR Arts • 13 December 2018

The Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher is one of the few twentieth-century artists who became almost universally known by the general public from the 1960s on. Constructed as visual paradoxes with impossible architectures, vaulting perspectives, and dramatic metamorphoses of form, his images startled. Once seen, they stamped themselves indelibly on the memory. I’ll hazard a guess that most of us can r ... (read more)

TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form

ABR Arts • 13 August 2018

Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra Biennial positions itself as a paean to the liveliness of artistic gesture. The exhibition’s curatorial frame invokes the notion of ‘will’, derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous notion of the will to power; although less the idea of an ambition to mastery – as troublingly appropriated by German fascism – than the philosopher’s conce ... (read more)

Hilarie Mais (TarraWarra Museum of Art)

ABR Arts • 05 March 2018

In a seminal essay titled ‘Grids’ (1978), the American art theorist Rosalind Krauss argued that, as a structure, the grid was emblematic of modernist ambition, encapsulating modernism’s streamlining project through the expunging of forms and conventions extraneous to it. The grid embodied a kind of will to silence, as well as an obvious antipathy to figuration and narrative in its pure recti ... (read more)