It’s a real coming of age for Hatched. This year, the landmark exhibition that has launched the careers of many Australian artists – turns 21! Every year for the past two decades Hatched has tracked the changing trends and developments in emerging contemporary art by providing an annual snapshot of the country’s aesthetic mood. The Hatched artists of 2012 continue to ask the difficult questions and find ever-new ways to manifest and give shape to the quandaries of our time.
The 36 artists from 22 art schools across Australia were carefully selected from over100 applicants by a panel made up of: Michelle Ho, curator at the Singapore Art Museum; independent curator Andrew Gaynor from Melbourne; Brisbane based-artist and lecturer Chris Bennie; and PICA curator Leigh Robb.Their bold and eclectic works will be presented throughout the vast PICA building. For many this will be their first opportunity to exhibitin a major public gallery and be seen and heard alongside their cross-country peers.
Hatched 2012 features the most recent work by Australia’s next generation of rising talents – as they mash up animation with performance, karaoke with poetry, HD video with glass sculptures, organic growths with scaffolding, and forays into geometry and printmaking with neon landscape painting.
They look back with inventiveness – the overhead projector makes a welcome return, and clashes with collage and stencils abound, and they look forward with experimentation – augmenting reality and building furniture for the future. These artists want to look again at masculinity, mythology, mapping and materiality in the 21^st century. Prepare to be tested and toyed with by these young provocateurs.
The Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize, now in its third year, once again offers one of the most generous and career changing art awards in the country by provide a massive $35,000kick start to the emergent practice of one selected Hatched artist.