Visitors to Taronga Zoo over the next month are likely to be confronted by an unusual exhibition as they meander between enclosures.

Giant images of 10 birds, some of them endangered, will be scattered at key points around the zoo as part of an inaugural QBE Muse exhibition aimed at highlighting the beautiful intricacy of a species that is too often missed in the zoo and in the wild.

Image: Taronga Zoo bird keeper Brendan Host holds Griffin the sooty owl with an image of the bird taken by photographic artist Leila Jefferys. Photo: Kate Geraghty

The MAK Centre for Art and Architecture West Hollywood and This x That (who dedicates to bringing architecture and design to broader audiences) present a site-specific installation by artist Paul Davies at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles.

In discussing what made a good portrait artist, Nicholas Harding cited a Chinese saying that it took "the head, the heart and the hand".

Harding - who won the 2001 Archibald Prize for a portrait of John Bell as King Lear - was at the National Portrait Gallery on Friday to talk about his exhibition Nicholas Harding: 28 Portraits which is on display until November 26. Curated by Dr Sarah Engledow, it features works in a range of media including oil paintings of actor Hugo Weaving and writer Robert Drewe, gouache paintings of Harding's mother-in-law Edie Watkins and actress Anna Volska, and spur-of-the-moment drawings of airline passengers drawn on refuse and airsick bags.

Image: Artist Nicholas Harding at his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Nicholas Harding: 28 Portraits. Photo: Jamila Toderas

Australian birdlife was also ruffling feathers in New York last week when Sydney gallery owner Tim Olsen had a star-studded cast turn up for the launch of artist Leila Jeffreys' extraordinary bird portraits at his Manhattan gallery Olsen Gruin, which has made quite an impact on the Big Apple art scene in just a few short months.

Image: Brooke Shields with Tim Olsen and Emerald Gruin in New York. Photo: Supplied

The two paintings he entered, of film maker Warwick Thornton and a self-portrait, were selected as semi-finalists. The self-portrait made it into the finalists, as did Tim Storrier’s portrait of Edwards, both vying to win $150,000 this week in Australia’s richest art prize.

Brooke Sheilds' Manhattan Townhouse. 
The actress decorates with style and substance.

Feathering her nest - Skye the Cockatoo - one of several large scale bird photos by Shields's friend Australian artist Leila Jeffreys on display - watches over the kitchen...

The fact an everyday object, such as a flower, can hold significant emotional importance and trigger memories forms the inspiration behind most of Sally Anderson’s work, including her winning entry in this year’s Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.

“Everyone has stories attached to things,” the 27-year-old Sydney artist said. “I’m fascinated by the brain and cognition and how we hold emotional weight within ­certain objects. It’s so interesting to me how objects or landscapes can hold memories and how those memories can change over time; it’s not fixed.”

Just one day after opening her first commercial solo exhibition in Sydney, artist Sally Anderson has won the 2017 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. The 27-year-old was awarded the prize, a three-month residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris and $40,000 in living and travel expenses, for her painting Dilling's Bromeliads with Gullfoss Falls, an intriguing pairing of landscape and still life.

Photo: Artist Sally Anderson: ''I'm fascinated by memory.'' Photo: Kate Geraghty

OLSEN GRUIN is pleased to present “Ornithurae” a new selection of work by the Australian artist, photographer and environmentalist Leila Jeffreys.

Jeffreys has photographed native birds in her home country and the US (she was personally invited to shoot at Ojai Raptor Center, a sanctuary for wounded birds in California). Her unique work has featured everything from budgies to eagles; wrens to pigeons; cockatoos to hawks.

_View online at the360mag.com

Olsen Gruin and Brooke Shields invite you to the opening of
LEILA JEFFREYS
ORNITHURAE VOLUME 1
Opening: Friday 13 October, 5–8pm
Exhibition continues until 12th November

Opened in New York’s Nolita neighborhood in March 2017, this gallery is a collaboration between Tim Olsen, a former Sydney-based gallerist, Emerald Gruin and her partner, Adrian, who were previously involved with Rox Gallery that shuttered its Lower East Side space in 2014. Their roster of artists includes some of Australia’s biggest contemporary exports, including TV Moore, George Byrne and Leila Jeffreys, along with American artists such as KOAK. Their venue is also a platform for contemporary Aboriginal artists to reach U.S. markets, and they recently held a group show organized by Adam Knight, vice president of the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia, featuring 15 artists. The gallery is presenting new works by Sydney-born, L.A.-based photographer George Byrne this fall.

The clean lines and colorful, minimal shapes in George Byrne’s photographs belie the busy, messy time in Los Angeles that led to their making. The Australian-born Byrne arrived in the city in 2010, after years of traveling. “I was personally in a very strange place when I got here,” he says. “No idea what I was doing with my life.”

_View article at My Design Alley

George Byrne's photographic work makes my heart skip a beat. Using the urban Los Angeles landscape as his canvas, George captures forms and colour into unique compositions so they have an incredible alchemy and depth. His latest exhibition, NEW ORDER, includes twelve new works, capturing new compositions of color and geometric forms on the streets of LA - once again taking the ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary.

Stephen Ormandy has a way with colour. His bold and graphic paintings are strongly influenced by the natural world with a focus on colour and organic forms. His large scale oil paintings and cultural work are a synergy of line, shape and surface all working beautifully in harmony. For Stephen, colour is ''pure joy'' and his latest exhibition at the Olsen Gruin gallery is no exception.

OLSEN GRUIN NEW YORK 

Six hard-edged paintings of curvy forms by the Australian artist and designer, who is making his New York solo début, evoke otherworldly figures and landscapes.

Laura brings to life her experience of witnessing the Great Barrier Reef’s changing conditions, how she learnt to use her art as a form of activism and how she worked alongside science to interpret and bring attention to the problems that our planet is facing.

The sad-clown painting functions as a sort of postmodern joke: an ironic gesture that dives into bad taste while subtly nodding to art history—the clown’s origins can be traced back to the stock character Pierrot of the commedia dell’arte, after all. Wesley Martin Berg’s paintings of clowns are informed by this tradition, but he also imbues his subjects with a solemn grace.