Top Arts 2018

Top Arts 2018 is here to …

1. Blow your socks off,

2. Highlight the creative inadequacies of your childlike finger-painting abilities,

3. Squash any doubts that Australia’s artistic future is in very good, paint-splashed and ink-stained hands. As Kendrick so relevantly once said, sit down, be humble.

A crowd favourite on the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition calendar, Top Arts is the annual exhibition of a selection of outstanding student artworks from the Art or Studio Arts part of the Victorian Certificate of Education. Made up of pieces from students across the state, the showcase involves a broad range of approaches and mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, digital and mixed media.

All of the students chosen for Top Arts were chosen for good reason. Of the many, these were our favourites.

Tanishka Brahmanand

An incredibly intense water-soluble charcoal sketch that runs away from the confines of traditional portraiture and captures a moment of unique personality.

Ashleigh Speechley

These injket prints of a person posing under a sheet wonderfully juxtapose the feelings of desperation and restriction with a look that can be likened to marble statues of the Renaissance era.

Sam Wilson

Depicting the artist’s grandmothers, this series of linocuts uses an array of techniques to display an motherly sense of intense concern and caution.

For a lot, artistic prowess is a rare gift for the extremely lucky among us. Adored artworks are a thing of wonder, an unachievably impressive form of creativity that is to be looked upon and not touched.

To observe a celebrated piece by a professional artist is always something, but to see creative adolescents, not yet in their twenties, expressing themselves with excessive skill and stumping imagination is downright humbling.

So get along to Top Arts 2018, sit down, enjoy the art, and be humble.

Details

Where: NGV Australia, Federation Square

When: 23 March – 15 July

Entry: Free, 10am–5pm daily

words by niall roeder