Art Wrap: Eight Exhibitions To See in (and Around) Sydney This Summer

Ron Mueck: Encounter at AGNSW

Curled toes on an elderly woman lying under a beach umbrella. Ribs poking out under the skin on a young boy crouching by a mirror. Wispy hair on a teenage girl leaning against a wall in her bathers. Ron Mueck’s sculptures are so hyperreal you half expect them to move. It’s astonishing what Melbourne-born Mueck can achieve with silicone, fibreglass and clay. Encounter is the London-based artist’s largest solo exhibition in Australia in over a decade, and it includes brand-new work Havoc – two packs of giant, ferocious dogs locked in a savage moment in time – that’s symbolic of the times we’re living in. Until April 12, 2026. $32–$35.

The Hooligans at White Rabbit Gallery

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2009), made of porcelain and weighing half a tonne, is one of the highlights of this exhibition of trouble-making, misfit artists – or those considered so by the Chinese state. It’s named for the term used by the Mao-era Chinese Communist Party for the crime of “hooliganism”, used to silence anyone seen as a threat to political or social order. The Hooligans features works by Chinese artists who have dared to defy, including Song Yongping’s With You in Charge, My Heart is at Ease (2016) a busy oil painting that mocks a famous phrase reportedly written by Mao Zedong to his successor. Another is the tantalisingly named The Tiger’s Butt Cannot be Touched (2023) which plays on the idiom meaning some things or people are too powerful and dangerous to mess with. Until May 17, 2026. Free.

Data Dreams: Art and AI at MCA

“Is it real or is it AI?” A defining question of today is pulled apart and pieced together in a disorienting way at this MCA exhibition. Artists from Paris, New York, Sri Lanka and Australia (among others) have used the new technology to examine what art is – and who or what is allowed to make it – in an age where almost everything is affected by AI. You’ll see jellyfish-like organisms move through blackness in a video work created with AI, built by artist Anica Yi to mimic her non-AI work. Then there’s Fabien Giraud’s The Feral – Epoch 1 (2025), another darkened room with a horror-like film shot and edited by AI, which feels unnerving and brain-tickling, like watching AI slop in a haunted house. The bigger questions are: how much does any of this matter? And what’s the human and environmental cost? Both are cleverly approached by each artist in their own way, too. Until April 27, 2026. $20–$35.

Infinite Scroll at Chau Chak Wing Museum

Raised by the internet? If so, then you’ll instinctively understand the combination of dark humour and deep critical thought expressed by three artists in this free exhibition at Chau Chak Wing. In a disorientating video game, Xia Han uses a looping Mario Kart-style experience to trap players in a thrilling, silly, frustrating and NSFW world. Then there’s Ye Funa’s textiles decorated with sequins and feathers but also smirking faces and scrolls of digitally altered selfies. Every piece in Infinite Scroll parodies the way we present ourselves and consume stuff online. While you’re there, stick your head into the extremely offline exhibition of delightful, decorative ceramics by Glenn Barkley, Kirsten Coelho, Vipoo Srivilasa and others. It’s a tonic to bingeing on all that brain candy. Until July 26, 2026. Free.

Lynda Draper | Glimmer at Campbelltown Arts Centre

Playful, organic, pearly-pink with beady green “eyes” – there’s a shiny tangle of noodle shapes in this survey of Thirroul-based artist Lynda Draper’s ceramics that almost invites you to touch it. Don’t, of course, not least because they’re very delicate. Draper’s sculptural works range from fairy kingdom-like pearlescent palaces to smooth porcelain ornaments of animals. Her four-decade career as an artist has pushed the technical limits of ceramic work, using things like domestic objects or childhood memories as starting points for her textural shapes. Here, you’ll find new works that incorporate glass and bronze for the first time, alongside items on loan from private and public collections. Until February 22, 2026. Free.

Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat at AGNSW

Sausages on the barbeque, toddlers playing in the sandpit, parents chatting and washing machines whirring in the background. It feels like a perfect Australian summer, but contained in an underground bunker in the city. New Zealand-born artist Mike Hewson has crafted a playground of wonder at AGNSW, and everyone’s invited to enjoy it – from the figure-eight monkey bars to the fully functioning sauna made from a modular construction shed. Most of what you see here is assembled from salvaged objects, such as the climbing structure made from wooden pallets, sandstone fragments, plastic buckets and heritage steelwork. It’s risky play, for sure, but parents be assured: there’s soft landing mats where it matters most. Until August 23, 2026. Free.

The Hidden Line: Art of the Boyd Women at Bundanon

There’s something enchanting and transcendent about Mary Nolan’s black-and-white photographs of her children (Alice, Celia, Tessa and Matthew Perceval) on holiday in Europe. They’re clambering out of a tent, brushing their teeth in a stream, picnicking under a tree – a snapshot of a family camping, except in this case they’re a famous artistic family. Mary Nolan (née Boyd) is one of Arthur Boyd’s sisters. The famed Australian painter and his artist wife Yvonne used to live at Bundanon, which is now open to the public as an art museum in Shoalhaven. You could get lost down a rabbit hole of the Boyd-Nolan-Perceval family tree, but to skip to the point: the men in the family have been celebrated more so than the women. Which is why Bundanon is putting five generations of the women in the family front and centre in this exhibition of more than 300 works, including paintings, ceramics, photography and sculpture. Other highlights include Yvonne Boyd’s Melbourne Tram (1944) depicting a wriggling toddler and older child with the most expressive faces, and Celia Perceval’s Tending the flower farm near Dural (1994–95) which feels alive with colour. Until February 15, 2026. $12–$18.

SEARCHERS: Graffiti and Contemporary Art at NAS Gallery

It’s fast, sticks to uneven surfaces and it makes a statement. Spray paint goes hand in hand with the urgency and often rebellious nature of the street art movement that exploded in 1960s New York. But did you know Sir Sidney Nolan experimented with spray paint? What about Archibald Prize-winner Ben Quilty, usually known for his thick, expressive impasto canvases? In a free exhibition as part of Sydney Festival, more than 30 Australian artists will show the blurred lines between graffiti and fine art at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. Graffiti writers SPICE, MACH, BAGL, LAZY and BREAK will spray a new work directly onto the walls, plus you’ll get to see early works by Khaled Sabsabi, Reko Rennie’s use of aerosol as a decolonising tool, and video works by Shaun Gladwell about reclaiming public space. From January 11 to April 17, 2026. Free.

Past exhibitions

Clarice Beckett: Paintings from the National Collection and Mirra Whale at Ngununggula

Headlights beaming onto wet bitumen. A woman’s coat flapping in the wind. Misty pink evening sky over St Kilda. Clarice Beckett’s ethereal tonal impressions of suburban Melbourne, captured in oil and painted in the early morning or late evening, were never celebrated in her lifetime – but now she’s considered one of Australia’s leading artists of the early 20th century. A rarely-seen collection of her work, donated to the National Gallery by Beckett’s sister in 1972, are on display at Bowral’s free art gallery. Presented alongside Beckett’s soft, luminous works is a new series by Sydney-based artist Mirra Whale, whose still-life paintings also capture the beauty of fleeting everyday life – such as magnolia petals on a white tablecloth, wedges of bright orange cut melon, or light hitting a carton of eggs. Closed January 25, 2026. Free.