Contemplating First Nations art as a tool of resistance and as offering alternative versions of Australian history, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia at AGWA covers enormous cultural territory, with more than 80 artists.
In Sydney, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, S.H. Ervin Gallery and Mosman Art Gallery have come together to explore how nine female artists reflect on and represent the natural world, from Robyn Stacey’s inversion of Brett Whiteley, to Joan Ross’s clever subversion of Sydney Harbour.
UK artist James Capper is bringing his insect-like, walking hydraulic sculptures to Hobart’s Mona, heralding an art practice of engineering, design and biology—all for a more sustainable future.
In 1985, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million, the most a public gallery had spent on an artwork. On year later, the painting was stolen and held ransom. Now, this unsolved mystery is being explored in the new SBS series FRAMED.
The work of Gordon Hookey is a meeting point of Indigenous resistance, activism, and the power of art—and his acclaimed paintings are currently showing in QAGOMA’s mammoth exhibition, the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10).
Fresh Material at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery sees 20 artists transcend conventional ideas of textile art, looking at the medium’s materiality and social resonance, whether that’s through Indigenous culture, queer theory, diaspora or the representation of women.
“Dear 2022, I don’t want to write any more essays about the pandemic. Signed, Sophia Cai.” As we push ourselves to the finish line of 2021, Sophia Cai looks back on the last 12 months, reflecting on a year defined by the swiftness of loss and the struggle for optimism.
Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art looks at sentience, interspecies communication, and definitions of ‘life’.
Jeffrey Smart’s paintings are distinctive. Sparsely populated, some of his near-empty metropolitan scenes have a melancholic, almost cataclysmic, air—like prescient glimpses of cities in lockdown—while others seem infused with an irreverent and sophisticated sense of play.
Considering most of us will be spending summer in Australia, we’ve curated our top pick of regional exhibitions to see across the country this holiday season. From Bendigo to Cowaramup to Mackay, they’re well worth making the trip for.
holemtaet hemia (hold this/ hold this tightly) is a new solo exhibition from Shari O’Dwyer at The Condensery, Toogoolawah, Queensland, that explores the woven memories between generations of South Sea Islanders in the Australian colony.
For artist Joel Sherwood Spring, working in video offers an entrée, with accessible technologies and immediacy, to his ongoing fields of enquiry about identity and capital, on display at his show Diggermode 2: Cloud Ceding at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.
Tender Comrade, currently on show at Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, creates a new vocabulary of queer kinship by reimagining the relationship between artworks, bodies and space.
Mundamurra Ngijinda Dulk—My Island Home at Cairns Art Gallery, is a landmark exhibition dedicated to the late Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, one of the most singular voices in Australian contemporary painting.
‘Vádye Eshgh (The Valley of Love)’ is a collaboration between Second Generation Collective and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah weaving through themes of beauty, diversity and the rebuilding of identity.
Auckland-born and raised artist Lisa Reihana is ever the optimist, creating two new works signifying social cohesion to hang outside two Australian arts venues—Ngununggula, and Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks —just as dark divisions seek to undermine the value of migration and Indigenous sovereignty.
