Mumkurla-nginyi-ma parrngalinyparla – from the darkness into the light. The Gurindji freedom banners are a collection of 10 hand-painted banners created in 2000 by the Gurindji to share the community’s version of the historic 1966 Wave Hill walk-off. The walk-off, or Gurindji strike, led by Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari was an important event in Australia’s land rights movement. Many of the 35 Gurindji people involved in the [...]

Experience Newcastle Art Gallery’s icons, loved favourites, and unexpected gems in our inaugural exhibition, Iconic Loved Unexpected. Across every space in the expanded Gallery, we celebrate our nationally renowned collection with a curated selection from more than 7,000 works of art by local, national and global artists. This multi-faceted display foregrounds First Nations art and traces the development of Australian art over more than 200 years, as well as [...]

Bett Gallery presents Kate McKenzie Lewis’s debut solo exhibition, Ember. This series examines bushfire-affected landscapes, capturing moments between destruction and renewal. The works reflect the dual nature of fire, balancing loss and transformation while celebrating nature’s resilience and ability to recover. Drawing on experience, observation, and research, Lewis weaves memories of smoke-filled skies, glowing horizons, and fire-impacted terrain with broader environmental themes, exploring how we perceive, remember, and [...]

It is with a view to capturing the totality of the pastoral influence upon remote Australia that Stockmen brings a range of visual ideas together, from dot painting to visionary landscapes. It is often said that contemporary art charts ideas of the future, while in this exhibition it is possible to envisage the fullness of the lived experience of a quickly receding past. These artists offer a sense of [...]

Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women? The Interior invites audiences into an exaggerated consultation room, playfully furnished for psychoanalysis. Natalya Hughes’s immersive installation—combining sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, and uncanny objets d’art, nestled around a hand-painted mural—generates a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases. Interested in the role of women and their historical absence from positions of power, [...]

Fragmented, divided—yet whole brings together recent works by Amanda Bennetts that use time as both material and metric for understanding the body. In Bennetts’ practice, time is not linear but lived. It is stretched, slowed, ruptured, and suspended by the realities of living in a body in flux that refuses normative rhythms and constantly requires new forms of understanding. Across these works, Bennetts moves between different geographies and [...]

“Changing States builds on ideas developed during my 2024 Edith Cowan University and Western Australian Parliament Artist in Residence program, as well as my recent group exhibition Paper Thin, Skin Deep at Mundaring Arts Centre 2026 curated by Annette Peterson. The work explores what it means to inhabit a body—through material, metaphorical, and cultural layers of skin. With over thirty years of experience across Australasia, including a decade working in [...]

This exhibition brings together the artists of Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre, Vanessa Inkamala, Kathy Inkamala, Dellina Inkamala and Raelene Inkamala (Western Arrernte), and Jordan Benson in a dialogue of tradition and innovation. Featuring artists from Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs, NT), this exhibition celebrates the enduring watercolour legacy of Albert Namatjira alongside new works by Melbourne-based artist Jordan Benson, who [...]

Juno Gemes and Robert Adamson on the Hawkesbury River celebrates the powerful creative partnership of photographer Juno Gemes and poet Robert Adamson, whose intertwined practices reveal a shared artistic, intellectual, and activist life shaped by collaboration and place.

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes delight and surprise audiences every year with fresh presentations of contemporary Australian painting and sculpture. At its heart, the Archibald Prize is about storytelling. Who are the people our artists have chosen to paint and what do their portraits reveal to us? In this exhibition, Australian and New Zealand artists use portraiture to share the beauty and complexity of our times. [...]

Presented alongside the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2026 at the Art Gallery of NSW, this salon-style wall features portraits of a different kind, not of people, but of other beings deserving of our affection – beloved pets, spirit guides and creature friends. Created by the artists of Little Orange Studio in Campbelltown, Pet Palace is a celebration of the unbreakable bonds (and knowing looks) between people and animals. For the [...]

Back in Five surveys twenty years of one of Aotearoa’s most bold and distinctive contemporary artists. Wayne Youle’s sculptural practice charts the passage of time not just as a theme but as a material that shapes, stretches, and reframes meaning. With his trademark playfulness and wit and working across a broad range of media, schoolboy pranks meet sharp cultural critique. Youle tackles big ideas—masculinity, fatherhood, colonial legacy, and [...]

Jeetje is an invitation to re-examine the work of Ans Westra (1936–2023), one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant documentary photographers. Jeetje  is a Dutch expression of surprise — and, in this case, delight. It sets the tone for this selection drawn from Westra’s vast archive of funny, tender, and poignant photographs spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. From poetry readings in graveyards to spirited street protests, from competitive dog shows [...]

Now in its second decade, D Lan Galleries flagship annual exhibition opens simultaneously across all three galleries, offering collectors rare access to historic and museum-quality paintings and sculpture by Australia’s most celebrated First Nations artists. At the foundation of this year’s exhibition is a selection of early Papunya paintings from the seminal 1971–72 period, including works by Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula and Uta Uta Tjangala. [...]

COLLECT returns to The Lock-Up for its ninth year, this time bringing together 126 artists—from early career to established—in a bold, energetic snapshot of Newcastle and the Hunter’s creative ecology. A much-loved annual fundraising exhibition, COLLECT champions the region’s artistic talent while raising vital funds for The Lock-Up’s ongoing program as a not-for-profit, independent contemporary art space. This year, COLLECT includes nationally significant artists such as Michael Bell, Lottie Consalvo, James Drinkwater, Locust Jones, [...]

‘Some memory cannot be documented. Some memory lives in the body.’ — Dr Natalie Harkin, Archival-Poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019) My Blood Sings Old Songs gathers artists who capture what is not always said—but deeply felt. The works in this exhibition resonate over time, unraveling layers of the body and the quiet weight of being seen, where movement becomes a vessel for remembrance. Hovering between an ending and a beginning, each gesture [...]

Positioning themselves within the frame, these artists craft memories and autobiographical narratives to explore truth, identity, culture, ancestry, and politics. Through deeply personal cultural and familial histories, the works reflect on lived experience while highlighting the ongoing impacts of Australia’s colonial past on First Nations peoples. Featured artists include Hayley Millar Baker, Michael Cook, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Damien Shen, Dr Christian Thompson AO, and Keemon Willams.

Kerry McInnis has been painting and drawing the River for many decades. The focus of her renditions of a waterway, wet or dry, has always been to represent the interconnectedness between the river and the earth that shapes it – to investigate the rhythms of liquid and solid form, to layer in paint the inconstancy of the river in both its power and vulnerability. Moving away from [...]

Artists from throughout Australia bring a lens on the concept of ‘earth’: our home, the environment, soil, land, fragility, strength or purpose; the need for its safe keeping and preservation, inclusive of all that lives within. This open exhibition has invited works to provoke awareness, dialogue, political activism, experimentation, thoughtfulness, playfulness, or deep contemplation.

Barbara Dawson’s work is a contemplation of senescence — ageing seen not as decline, but as a layered experience shaped by growth, memory, and renewal. Using the life cycles of plants as metaphor, she explores the human journey: its fragility, quiet strength, and continual transformation. These works trace the parallel landscapes of inner and outer worlds, finding beauty in both blossoming and fading, in change, endurance, and [...]

In Abstract Connotations, Hincksman explores human nature and our interactions with the natural environment., in the face of rapid changes due to the advancement of technology and social change. Hicksman’s practice allows the simplicity of everyday thoughts and experiences to inspire the paintings. The process can be quite dynamic between contemplation and the use of colour, form and tone, along with the fluidity of paint with various forms [...]

Focussing on line rather than tone, this exhibition features drawings on paper in a variety of media including pencil, crayons, ink, and watercolour. These are not necessarily drawings of things; they are abstract works but may evoke subjects. As clay dries, it hardens, and each stage creates a different engagement with the drawing process. Roper says, “Line drawing has been much on my mind of late as [...]

The National Art School (NAS) presents a major exhibition, The Neighbour at the Gate, curated by a guest curatorium led by Clothilde Bullen OAM (Wardandi Noongar and Badimaya Yamatji), with Micheal Do and Zali Morgan (Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar). Bringing together newly commissioned works by leading Australian artists Jacky Cheng, Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson, Dennis Golding (Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay), Jenna Mayilema Lee (Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, KarraJarri), James Nguyen and James Tylor (Kaurna, Thura-Yura language region), the exhibition reckons with the echoes of immigration policies and the legacies [...]

Petal as Pixel draws on an enduring fascination with Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), reimagining its themes of seduction, excess, and latent violence through a contemporary lens. Comprising over 80 works, the exhibition centres on a large suspended mobile of mirrored surfaces, chains, and collaged imagery, precariously assembled in situ. As elements shift, reflections fragment and multiply, enveloping the viewer in a disorienting visual field.

A group exhibition that invites us to look toward the soaring skies above. While Western Australia is well known for its vast blue horizons, this exhibition turns to the darker moments – luminous clouds thickening, rain pending, storms breaking without warning. Across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video, the artists consider the unfolding drama of shifting weather patterns and the moods they carry with them.

Balun Gawarima – River Story is a new exhibition by Indigenous artist Melody Popple, developed through her PhD project Moving Through Waters. Grounded in the waterways of Bundjalung Jagun, the exhibition explores the cultural, emotional, and ecological significance of water through bush dyeing, natural pigments, and visual story-mapping. Created in collaboration with Country, the works use native flora, found materials, and water gathered from local river systems to produce richly [...]