Concrete Playground

The National Art School Gallery is a spectacular space and showing it off this Art Month is the international touring exhibition Erased. The show, which has travelled throughout Asia, has made its return to Sydney for the month that brings artists, galleries and gallery-goers out of the woodwork with a series of talks, late night openings and workshops.

Erased is curator Natasha Bullock's assessment of contemporary Australian drawing and it offers artistic practices as diverse as mark-making to imprinting, gesture to sculpture. The six Australian artists include Vernon Ah Kee, whose masterful portraits seem to stare, blank eyed, into your soul; Christian Capurro, with nearly-there works on paper created through the action of erasure; Simryn Gill, who has captured the globe in haphazard sculpture; Jonathan Jones, with subtly embossed works on paper in conversation with graphite drawings; Tom Nicholson, who takes our eyeline upwards with his hung flags; and Raquel Ormella, whose whiteboard worlds are rich and inviting.

The show is not only a great way of stepping into Sydney's sandstone past — the National Art School, nearly 100 years old, is located in the old Darlinghurst Gaol — but a fabulous way of surveying the art of drawing in the Australia of now.

Gallery talk 5 March 2 – 3 pm free

Art Forum series 16 March 1 – 2 pm free

Art Month late night 17 March free

Drawing Workshop 19 March 12 – 1 pm free

Image: Vernon Ah Kee, Unwritten #10, 2008