Exhibitions
To kickstart your creative escape, we’ve handpicked a selection of must-see exhibitions, each one an invitation to step in from the cold and let powerful, thought-provoking artworks warm your spirit.
The Intelligence of Painting throws a spotlight on the energy of contemporary painting in Australia today through the work of 14 Australian women artists.
The exhibition includes recent MCA Collection acquisitions, as well as new and recent paintings by Karen Black, Angela Brennan, Eleanor Louise Butt, Prudence Flint, Maria Madeira, Thea Anamara Perkins, Kerrie Poliness, Jude Rae, Jessica Rankin, Julie Nangala Robertson, Gemma Smith, Jelena Telecki, Jenny Watson and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.
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Kimono designs and Japanese style have inspired global art, design and fashion since Japan re-opened to the world in the mid nineteenth century. This exhibition displays historically significant and visually dynamic examples of costume and fashion from Japanese history, and establish a creative lineage to the most experimental and innovative fashion designers of today.
Works include Noh and Kogen costume, popular intricately decorated kimono of the samurai and merchant classes of the Edo period, examples of Japanese early interaction with western fashions during the late nineteenth century, Japanese modernist fashion of the early twentieth century, and key works by fashion innovators Issey Miyake and John Galliano, Japanese contemporary creative Hiroko Takahashi and Harajuku street fashions.
Alongside unique examples of kimono and kimono inspired costume the exhibition features paintings, posters, wood block prints, magazines and decorative arts that contextualise themes the kimono story. It presents the diverse skills mastered by traditional artisans that include shibori tie die, rice paste resist designs and indigo blue dyeing and highlight the numerous materials used for textile production throughout Japanese history, including silk, cotton, metallic thread, paper, elm bark, banana tree fibre and deer leather.
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Wonderstruck explores the wonder that can be found in the ordinary and the extraordinary. Presented throughout the ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), the exhibition invites visitors on a journey from spectacular large-scale artworks to captivating small treasures and immersive experiences.
Featuring more than 100 artworks and interactive projects by over 70 international and Australian artists drawn from the Gallery’s Collection, the exhibition will include audience favourites Nick Cave’s Heard 2012, Ron Mueck’s In bed 2005 and Yayoi Kusama’s The Obliteration Room 2002-present.
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Italian sculptor Arcangelo Sassolino uses technology and mechanics to reveal the inner life of his raw materials. Extreme force, tension, speed, heat and gravity are all harnessed to bring about dramatic transformations, to test the physical limits of matter, the fragile balance between control and surrender. Why, he asks, cannot sculpture flow like time instead of being cold, rigid and devoid of the vital energy that produced it?
Change arrives, as it must, but Sassolino often engages our anticipation for what’s about to happen. His sculptures act as ‘psychological traps’, he says, drawing us in as spectators, igniting our suspense as we watch and wait.
As you move through the exhibition, you will see various industrial materials put through their paces. Working through a great pile of wooden beams, a hydraulic piston methodically forces each piece to splinter and break. A suspended sheet of glass bows under the weight of a boulder, alongside a truck tyre squeezed and distorted under immense pressure. Twin metal discs, coated in thick industrial oil, spin slowly while gravity does its work. And, from the ceiling of one entire gallery, steel heated to 1500°C showers down as liquid metal and firelight in the darkness. ‘When steel melts, its energy becomes light,’ Sassolino explains. At the Venice Biennale in 2022 he used fiery droplets of molten steel to evoke the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s seventeenth-century paintings, specifically the brutal Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. There was darkness, then light, then darkness returned. But here and now, Sassolino seems to look more to the future than the past, playing with fire as a destructive and regenerative force in our rapidly changing world.
Maybe mine is, at its core, a work about the open wound that is life.
Arcangelo’s experiments with physics bring with them a reminder of our own impermanence. His art is a metaphor, perhaps, for our own flash in the dark for change that is as inevitable as our end; but where even destruction can bring forth further transformation and renewal.
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The Archibald Prize has always created controversy and conversation. For over a century, artists from Australia and New Zealand have captured the spirit of their times through portraiture, reflecting the personalities and issues that define their communities.
The Wynne Prize for landscape painting of Australian scenery, or figure sculpture, celebrates the diversity of representations of our country, and the Sulman Prize is for subject painting, genre painting or a mural project.
These ‘must-see’ annual exhibitions of finalists and winners have become fixtures in our artistic calendar.
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Love Story is a celebration of the profound bond artists share with their subjects, be it the serenity of nature, the complexity of human relationships, the quiet beauty of everyday objects, or the unseen forces that inspire creation. Every piece in this collection is infused with passion and purpose, offering a heartfelt glimpse into the artist’s world and the stories they are compelled to tell.
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