Memo Review is Naarm/Melbourne’s only platform for weekly art criticism, offering critical perspectives from Australian artists, writers and scholars.

Join us at the Institute for Modern Art for the launch of Memo 3, a contemporary art critical writing glossy magazine from Memo Review. Editors Paris Lettau and Hilary Thurlow will introduce the issue, in which kitsch—what Catherine Liu dubs political message art the highest form of—revolves as a central theme.

Issue 3 features a focus on Maria Kozic, whose work has long unsettled the artworld’s uneasy relationship with pop culture. Articles by Gemma Topliss, Victoria Perin and Philip Brophy unpack the irreverent, uncompromising, and sometimes graphic logic of Kozic’s art, whose work refuses easy categorisation, forcing pop into stranger, darker territory.

The issue’s special section on Art & Crime brings together leading critics and artists confronting how stolen wages, incarceration, and colonial violence shape “Australian” art. 

Other features include pieces on D Harding, Mark Rothko, Madonna Staunton, Sidney Nolan and many more. With contributions from Biddy Mahy, Penelope Jackson, Tristen Harwood, Isobel D’Cruz Barnes, Kate Meakin, Dana Kopel and others.