Colin McCahon's "Teaching aide" is part of the Signs and Symbols exhibition on now at the AGNSW.  Once the painter was making signs and symbols to live by: now he makes things to hang on walls at exhibitions.
- Colin McCahon, 1972
New Zealand painter Colin McCahon wanted art to possess the moral force and spiritual urgency that he admired in the historical art of churches. But he also knew that modern artists had to confront new doubts and uncertainties. In the 20th century, could art still offer signs and symbols to live by?
The artists in this exhibition all respond to this question in different ways.
Alongside Teaching aids 2 (July) by McCahon are works by Australian and New Zealand artists – Richard Bell, Shane Cotton, Rosalie Gascoigne, Brent Harris and Imants Tillers – who have been inspired by his use of words and numbers to communicate ‘a message which can burn’.
Similarly epic and ambitious works by European and American artists, including Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly and Philip Guston, are also on display. Reaching into art’s past for forms that speak to the present, these painters confront and counter what Guston, echoing McCahon, called ‘the loss of faith in the known image and symbol’  Courtesy AGNSW

Elisabeth Cummings – Interior Landscapes
​Fri 17 February — Sun 9 April 2017

Elisabeth Cummings graduated from the National Art School in Sydney in the 1950s as part of a cohort of high achievers.
Most of her contemporaries made careers and gained recognition well before she did. The twenty-first century has witnessed her rocketing to prominence. She is now among the most widely acclaimed and best loved painters of her generation.
This exhibition, curated by Sioux Garside, surveys Cummings’s sumptuous paintings of studio interiors and her evocations of the landscape.
Although her painting is figurative in its general orientation, it maintains a highly animated dialogue with abstraction and with  her revered forerunners such as Bonnard, Vuillard, Braque, Fairweather and Cossington-Smith.

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Euan Macleod at Orange Regional Gallery 10 December 2016 – 5 February 2017

The prints of Euan Macleod (b.1956) have played a significant role in the evolution of the artist’s career. By pushing the boundaries of this exacting medium, Macleod has further probed aspects of the human condition, extending his idiosyncratic oeuvre.

The highly expressive, experimental nature of the prints on exhibition complement the artist’s celebrated career as a major painter of our times. The artist’s rigorous control of line, form and tone underpin his skill in crossing over from painting to printmaking. The long, successful association with master printmakers Ron McBurnie (Monsoon Press, Townsville), Michael Kempson (Cicada Press, Sydney) and Marian Maguire (Limeworks, Christchurch) attests to a creative collaboration reflecting the vision and talent of all involved. Ultimately, it is the spontaneity and richness of surface transferred from Macleod’s painting practice that places the body of prints alongside the paintings as fine, poetically-charged works of intrigue and substance.

It is a significant gesture for Orange Regional Gallery to mount the print exhibition as it was the first institution to acquire a major work from the artist, Trench, 1992. The Gallery also hosted the artist’s successful 2011 touring survey exhibition; Surface Tension: the art of Euan Macleod. The Gallery also holds works by Macleod from The Chroma Collection.

Euan Macleod: Prints 1991-2016 was curated by Gavin Wilson.

Euan Macleod is represented by Watters Gallery, Sydney