Exhibitions
As we welcome Spring and delight in being in the outdoors as the weather warms up, don’t forget to nourish your soul with art as well.
Here are some exhibitions that caught our eye that you won’t want to miss out on seeing.
‘Beautiful Wickedness’ is the most significant exhibition of work by celebrated Australian artist eX de Medici yet staged. The survey examines the artist’s central concerns, including the fragility of life, global affairs, greed and commerce, and the universal themes of power, conflict, and death.
Exhibition highlights include de Medici’s intricate botanical studies and her dazzling large-scale watercolours, as well as her compelling portrait of Midnight Oil Nothing’s as Precious as a Hole in the Ground 2001, and Shotgun Wedding Dress/ Cleave 2015, a bridal gown based on Julie Andrews’s dress from The Sound of Music.
Through these wide-ranging subjects and materials, de Medici aims to seduce her viewers, and to shake them out of complacency.
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The first major solo exhibition by one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photomedia artists
Through her photographs and moving image works, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar examines the politics of image-making. Deeply researched yet emotionally sensitive, her work can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.
Afshar uses the camera to give visibility to those who have been denied it, resolutely insisting on the humanity of her subjects. She makes us contend with violence and brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in empathy yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.
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Pierre Bonnard is one of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, celebrated for his use of colour to convey an exquisite sense of emotion. His close friend Henri Matisse declared that Bonnard was ‘a great painter, for today and definitely also for the future’.
Now showing until the 8th of October 2023, the blockbuster Melbourne Winter Masterpieces® exhibition Pierre Bonnard presents the iridescent paintings of Bonnard within immersive scenography by Paris-based designer India Mahdavi.
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Know My Name: Making it Modern celebrates pioneering women artists who changed the course of modern art in Australia.
Drawn from the national collection, this major exhibition profiles Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Clarice Beckett and Olive Cotton, their works unified by their expressions of daily life, nature, still life and interior worlds of place, mind and imagination.
From dramatic prints by Margaret Preston, to evocative photographs of Olive Cotton, to Grace Cossington Smith’s radiant paintings, and the poetic atmosphere of Clarice Beckett’s works, Making it Modern presents each artist’s distinctive approach to their artistic practice and what it meant to be a modern woman in their times.
Making it Modern continues to build on the National Gallery’s Know My Name initiative which celebrates the work of all women artists with an aim to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.
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Iconic works by two of the most influential and loved artists of the twentieth century – Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – feature in this Australian exclusive exhibition, alongside works by key Mexican contemporaries.
Love, passion and politics lie at the heart of Frida & Diego. The couple, radical in their art and politics, were at the forefront of the artistic and cultural avant-garde in post-revolution Mexico from the 1920s to the 1950s. Today they are worshipped globally for their fusion of traditional Mexican folk art and international modernism.
Featuring more than 150 works, including paintings, works on paper, photographs and period clothing, this major exhibition from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection positions Kahlo and Rivera within the broader context of Mexican Modernism. It also includes works by Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, María Izquierdo, Carlos Mérida, David Alfaro Siqueiros and others.
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Known for his extraordinary technical prowess, Michael Zavros has captivated audiences with his sumptuous realist renderings and surreal juxtapositions.
Frequently engrossed in notions of quality and luxury, fashion and appearance, Zavros’s idealised imagery has developed alongside Australia’s pronounced turn to conspicuous consumption and aspirational individualism.
‘The Favourite’ will profile significant thematic explorations of the artist, including fashion magazines, European palaces, luxury cars, his children, Narcissus and still life, in addition to his self-portraits and reflections upon his heritage. It will survey 25 years of painting, sculpture, photography and video by this leading contemporary Queensland artist.
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Zoe Leonard is one of today’s most critically acclaimed artists. This presentation of Al río / To the River is the first major exhibition of the internationally renowned artist’s work in Australia.
Working with photography, sculpture and site-specific installation, Leonard balances a conceptual clarity with a distinctly personal vision. Her photographs are often grounded in observations of daily life. Migration and displacement, gender and sexuality, mourning and loss, cultural history and the tensions between the natural world and human built environments are recurring themes. Using seriality, shifting perspectives and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard probes the politics of representation and display, and invites us to contemplate the role the photographic medium plays in constructing history.
Over a period of five years, beginning in 2016, Leonard photographed along the 2,000 km stretch where the Rio Grande/ Río Bravo is used to demarcate the international boundary between Mexico and the United States, following the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico.
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The More is More exhibition is here to celebrate maximalists who love more colour, more texture and more layers. On now until the 30th of September, visitors can explore a diverse range of works that redefines what it means to be a maximalist with its bold use of colours and unique layering techniques. Visitors will be able to explore the incredible range of artwork created by passionate Australian artists.
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