Elizabeth Fortescue

Sydney

Arts Journalist and Writer at Freelance

Saleroom writer at Australian Financial Review

Australian art writer and arts journalist. My Saleroom column on the art market is in every Thursday's Australian Financial Review. Posting personal views only.

Articles

Archibald Prize won by Julie Fragar for Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), a painting of her friend and fellow Brisbane artist Justene Williams

6 days ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Updated May 9, 2025 – 1.11pm, first published at 1.09pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Julie Fragar has won the $100,000 Archibald Prize for portraiture for an oil painting of her friend and fellow artist Justene Williams.
Sotheby’s bets on New York demand for Indigenous art

1 week ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

May 7, 2025 – 1.38pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Australian Indigenous art will once more feature in New York’s glamour spring auction calendar this month, after a hiatus forced by the boating death of pioneering Sydney art consultant Tim Klingender.
20 business types + a $1m super investment = an unusual art collective

2 weeks ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Apr 30, 2025 – 5.34pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? A ramshackle rocketship with a payload of decrepit dwellings is one of eight artworks consigned to auction next week by an Australian-based art investment collective boasting top-tier business and legal names among its 20-strong membership.
Uyghur art show by Aniwar Mamat in Sydney attempts to tell a different Chinese story

2 weeks ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Apr 28, 2025 – 4.36pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Art’s role as a global ambassador has long been recognised, and so it is with Australia’s first exhibition of contemporary Uyghur art from China.
Uli Sigg is offloading his Howard Arkley. Asking price, $1m-plus

3 weeks ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Apr 23, 2025 – 4.45pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? A suburban interior in brash, throbbing colours by the late Australian artist Howard Arkley has been consigned by one of the world’s biggest art collectors and features as the cover lot of Sydney’s next major art auction.
Preacher’s courage during Rwandan massacre inspired artist George Gittoes

3 weeks ago | smh.com.au | Elizabeth Fortescue

By Elizabeth Fortescue April 21, 2025 — 5.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Thirty years ago this week, a young African preacher in Rwanda’s Kibeho refugee camp read aloud from the Bible to reassure his flock in the midst of one of the worst and most brutal massacres of modern times.
paintings by Brett Whiteley and Emily Kame Kngwarreye fetch high prices

4 weeks ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

A “very wealthy Melbourne entrepreneur” is the new owner of an early career abstract painting by Brett Whiteley that topped the price rankings at last week’s Menzies auction in Sydney. Untitled Red Painting III, 1961, previewed by Saleroom on March 26, looked glamorous under the spotlight on auction night at Menzies’ Kensington premises. Auctioneer Martin Farrah took a long sip of water before opening the bidding on the picture. Loading... Follow the topics, people and companies that matter to you.
A record-setting photo and a $2.5m number plate

1 month ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Apr 9, 2025 – 4.40pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? A career-defining work by a photographer who died when she was only 30 years old set a record for Australian photography at what was easily the biggest art sale of the year so far in Sydney this week.
Foreign buyers swoop as Indigenous art takes off

1 month ago | afr.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Apr 2, 2025 – 5.33pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? The late, great Emily Kam Kngwarreye was the prime mover behind the most financially successful Indigenous art auction in this country since 2007, with a much-travelled work once owned by a leading corporate identity becoming the artist’s second most expensive painting under the hammer.
‘Brain’ of late composer lives on in show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia

1 month ago | theartnewspaper.com | Elizabeth Fortescue

Can an artist’s creative essence persist beyond death? In probing this question, a team of Australian artists and biological innovators has engineered a human “mini-brain” that composes a musical score in real time as audiences watch and listen. The installation, titled Revivification, goes on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) from 29 March. Revivification consists of an incubator housing a lab-grown “in-vitro brain”.