News feed
Credit: Jacquie Manning/Courtesy of AGNSW
In occasion of its current Sydney International Art Series exhibition Nude: art from the Tate collection, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is this month playing host to a series of free after hours events that aim to interrogate ideas of nudity with help from leading Australian thinkers.
Taking place every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening throughout January, Nude at Night presents a diverse program of talks, live music, film screenings, guided tours and nearly-nude drawing classes alongside extended opening hours for Nude, which encompasses over 100 major representations of the nude throughout countless art movements spanning romanticism, cubism, surrealism and feminism from artists such as Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Henri Matisse, Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman.
Lauded Australian writers including Christos Tsiolkas, Linda Jaivin, Benjamin Law, Anita Heiss and Michael Leunig will take to the stage each Wednesday evening to read a new work as part of Nude fictions. Each writer has composed an original fictional backstory to one of the works showcased in the exhibition as part of a special edition of the regular Art After Hours event series.
The following evenings, philosophers and thinkers from The School of Life will contribute to discussions about ideas associated with nudity as part of Naked ideas, a series that will question our interpretations of the nude that span from love and mortality to vulnerability and vulgarity. Friday evenings will play host to a series of Nearly Nude mass drawing workshops in a dedicated pop-up bar, alongside guided tours of the exhibition thematised around ideas of body politics, sexiness, feminism and humour.
As part of a partnership with the Sydney Dance Company in association with Sydney Festival, Nude Live will also see six of the company’s resident dancers performing alongside the exhibition in a piece choreographed by Rafael Bonachela. Select renditions will be nudist performances, where audience members will be in the nude and clothed audience members will not be admitted. Those shows are all currently sold-out.
Nude at Night will take place each week from tomorrow until Friday January 27. For more information about the full program, head here.
Tile and cover image: Jacquie Manning/Courtesy of AGNSW
