In the Galleries: Nine Art Exhibitions To See in (and Around) Sydney in Spring

Pedro Wonaeamirri: Awirankini jilamara kapi purinjirringuwi: new designs on wood at Station Gallery

This solo exhibition presents a range of new works from Pedro Wonaeamirri, a senior artist and revered cultural leader from the Tiwi Islands, just north of Darwin. His practice spans ochre paintings on plywood, stringybark and tunga (bark bags). These new pieces are united by the artist’s devotion to the Tiwi myth of Japarra, or moon man, whose story is central to Tiwi beliefs around the life cycle and mortality. Among the show’s highlights are undoubtedly the tunga works – decorative vessels made from stringybark originally used to carry food and water, and important to Tiwi ceremonies of Pukumani (mourning) and Tiwi Yoi (dance).

Until October 3. Free entry.

Kate Tucker: Thinking With My Hands at Darren Knight Gallery

The intricate work of Melbourne-based Archibald finalist Kate Tucker is part sculpture, part painting, part collage, part installation. Her mesmerising pieces are found in the homes of collectors across the country. In this show – presented with Melbourne gallery Daine Singer –Tucker also explores how digital art-making expands her practice. Her semi-abstract visual style is on display in paintings such as Low winter sun (walking off the polycrisis), in which recognisable landscape forms reveal themselves through fragments and contrasting colours.

October 3 to October 31. Free entry.

Nolan: Origins at Art Gallery of NSW

Sidney Nolan is one of those canonical Australian artists whom our institutional galleries like to reframe, recontextualise and reappraise every few years. This time, AGNSW homes in on Nolan’s early adulthood before he left for the UK in 1953. That means the famous Ned Kelly paintings of the 1940s, as well as his remarkable landscapes of Central Australia, regional Victoria and K’gari / Fraser Island, among others. Nolan lived overseas up until his death in London in 1992, yet the imagery, light and character of the Australian environment was so often at the heart his work wherever he went. The pieces produced in these early years offer a portrait of the artist as he found his visual language.

October 3 to February 7, 2027. $10 to $37.  

Tony Albert: Not a Souvenir at MCA

For this landmark exhibition from one of Australia’s most celebrated First Nations artists, the “where” is almost as important as the “what”. On the western side of Circular Quay, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) sits on land that’s charged with the legacy of early colonial contact. It is also, of course, a tourist precinct, surrounded by stores selling souvenirs and trinkets relating to Sydney and Australia. Albert’s exhibition is a profound examination of the commodification and exploitation of Aboriginal culture through over 3000 pieces of “Aboriginalia” – kitsch objects, like tea towels, ashtrays and fake boomerangs, from the 1950s and ’60s decorated with racist Aboriginal caricatures – from his expanding personal collection (visitors can contribute objects of their own as well). Across sculpture, photography, painting and installation works, Not a Souvenir asks questions about authenticity, appropriation and stereotypes, while reframing and reclaiming these often-problematic objects in a way that celebrates Aboriginal identity and resilience.

Until October 19. $20–$35, under 18s free.

Heather B Swann: The Forests of Symbols at UNSW Galleries

In 2025, celebrated Hobart-based artist and Wynne Prize finalist Heather B Swann was awarded the $80,000 Copyright Agency Partnerships commission for UNSW Galleries.

Now open, the ambitious exhibition resulting from the grant brings together new and rarely seen works across Swann’s sculpture, painting and drawing practice. That includes the show’s most prominent work: a striking sculpture of elongated red lips, titled Would I lie to you? 

Until November 22. Free entry.

Avatar: Forms of Vishnu at AGNSW

In Hindu and Buddhist belief, the deity Vishnu is the overseer and preserver of the universe. When Vishnu descends to Earth to restore balance, he takes one of 10 forms known as avatars (avatar means “descent” in Sanskrit). This exhibition explores the ways artists have depicted Vishnu’s avatars. The show spans 15 centuries and more than 200 works across sculpture, painting and installation, with a particular focus on rare pieces from India and Cambodia. Among the highlights is a sixth-century Cambodian representation of Krishna and 16th-century paintings depicting Indian epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata, alongside works commissioned especially for the exhibition from names including Australian Indian artist Desmond Lazaro and New Dehli-based Sumakshi Singh.

Until October 5. $10–$37, kids under 12 free.

Man on Fire: Visions of Nebuchadnezzar at Bundanon

Arthur Boyd’s series of paintings depicting the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar, created in London in the 1960s, stands among the great Australian artist’s most groundbreaking works. This exhibition, at Shoalhaven’s idyllic destination gallery Bundanon, sees the series presented alongside a new commission from Shaun Gladwell, the acclaimed contemporary artist best known for his visceral, often politically charged video works. Boyd’s Nebuchadnezzar series – which transposes the Old Testament story to the Australian bush with the artist’s signature macabre imagery – is often interpreted as commentary on the Vietnam War. Gladwell’s work, created while in residence at Bundanon, responds to it with a piece addressing questions of masculine identity, our relation to the environment, and the possibility of renewal.

Until October 11. Free with general admission to Bundanon ($18 for adults, $12 for concessions, kids 12 or below free).

Connections: MCA x Tate at Museum of Contemporary Art

This exhibition is the result of a trans-hemispheric partnership between modern art institutions on opposite sides of the world: London’s Tate Modern and the MCA at Circular Quay. Between 2015 and 2022, the two galleries enjoyed a collaboration designed to showcase Australian art internationally, yielding 35 joint acquisitions for display at both spaces. The Tate showed many of these works between 2021 and 2023, and now it’s Sydney’s turn. See works from some of the most illustrious names in modern Australian art, including Gordon Bennett, Vernon Ah Kee, Bonita Ely, Daniel Boyd, Judy Watson, Balang John Mawurndjul AM and Nonggirrnga Marawili. There’ll also be select pieces from the MCA’s own collection and new commissions.   

Until March 1, 2027. Admission with general admission, $20 to $25, under 18s free.

Iconic Loved Unexpected at Newcastle Art Gallery

Further afield, the newly revamped Newcastle Art Gallery has a free exhibition featuring leading Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s slightly terrifying Nature’s Little Helpers – Surrogate (for the Northern Hairy Nosed Wombat), Nell’s disarming sculpture The ghost on the road will never die, and Brett Whiteley’s almost sunburnt Wynne Prize-winner Summer at Carcoar, his entry from 1978, when he also won the Archibald and Sulman prizes. There are close to 500 works on display – just a fraction of the gallery’s 7000-strong collection – including Joseph Lycett’s Inner view of Newcastle and contemporary sculptures such as Japanese artist Kazuo Yagi’s tactile, tubular Design Plan (Face).

Ongoing. Free.

Past exhibitions

Kathy Temin: Wall Works 2026 at Ames Yavuz

You might’ve seen Kathy Temin’s work on Instagram, when she transformed Kim Kardashian and Kayne West’s LA home into a white winter wonderland forest for Christmas in 2023. The prominent Sydney-born, Melbourne-based artist has been creating her large-scale idiosyncratic works, made from synthetic fur, since the 1990s. They’re slightly cartoonish installations, playing with shaggy forms, bulbous, lumpy shapes and abstract landscapes. For her first solo exhibition at Ames Yavuz in Surry Hills, Temin has produced a seven-metre-long row of hanging “furs”, alongside other intricately woven works that demonstrate a love of minimalist forms. It’s also “about feminism and this particular area of Surry Hills where my father worked,” Temin says.

Closed September 12. Free entry.

Level Two at Chalk Horse

Level Two at Chalk Horse is about level two at Chalk Horse, Sydney’s long-running ARI turned commercial gallery. Marking the expansion of the Darlinghurst gallery to the second floor of its William Street building, the show features every artist it represents, alongside guest artists Arm Wantaya, Kohl Tyler and Omar Musa. See new work by recent Sulman Prize finalist Nathan Hawkes, as well as Clara Adolphs and Jason Phu. There’s an eclectic mix of subjects and styles, from the warm family portraiture of Warlpiri artist Adrian Jangala Robertson to Laura Jones’s colourful still lifes and eight-time Archibald finalist Jasper Knight’s paintings of urban and industrial scenes.

Closed July 19. Free

eX de Medici: Original Sin at Sullivan & Strumpf

eX de Medici has spent several decades following an artistic path defined by a fierce disgust at power, corruption, violence and inequality. Original Sin is a dynamic addition to her body of work: a series of colourful, complex and disarming paintings that address warfare in the 21st century – tanks, fighter jets, burning oil fields, drones and missiles are all recurring motifs. Some pieces take cues from Sun Tzu’s famous Art of War and feature Chinese calligraphy created in collaboration with artist Wu Wei Rong. Other large-scale works are grand statements that reward a closer look. The show is a timely glimpse into the mind of one of Australia’s most fascinating iconoclasts and significant contemporary artists.

Closed June 20. Free.

Dean Cross: A Breath Before Dawn at Station Gallery

Dean Cross, a Worimbi artist raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country in Canberra, is the first man in his family in more than 145 years not to enlist in the army. This significant personal decision informs A Breath Before Dawn, an exhibition that explores Indigenous identity and experience as it relates to military service and war. The show is defined by an emotional two-channel video piece showing Cross – whose work is held by major collections across the nation – dancing on Country while dressed in military uniform. Also part of the exhibition: a new photo series that toys with the traditional conventions of military portraiture.

Closed July 4. Free.

Nadia Hernández Para verte mejor, en todo tiempo (To see you better, at all times) at AGNSW

Nadia Hernández often works with family and friends, creating textile collages that drape from ceiling to floor with phrases and fragmented poetry that are both political and hopeful. The Melbourne-based artist looks at the complex experiences of the Venezuelan diaspora, and this solo show is an extension of an ongoing body of work centred on themes of migration, exile and displacement.

Running at almost the same time as her AGNSW exhibition, Station Gallery in Surry Hills has a solo exhibition of Hernández's works focusing on the intimacies of everyday life at home.

Closed June 21. Free.

Significant at D Lan Galleries

As it enters its second decade, D Lan’s Significant remains one of the most anticipated First Nations art events on the calendar. The show offers a “secondary market” for buyers – resale, essentially – and this year some remarkable works are in play. The influential Papunya artists of the early 1970s hold a special place in Australian art history, and Significant includes paintings by central figures Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Uta Uta Tjangala. The show is a rare opportunity to experience some of the most important names in Indigenous art – including Rover Thomas, Albert Namatjira and Emily Kame Kngwarreye – over the past century in a commercial gallery setting.

Until June 27. Free.

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.

Old Days, New Days | Arlta-imankinya, Arlta-errama at Ngununggula

Betty Nungarrayi Conway’s vivid depiction of Ilara Creek shows joyful figures bobbing in an aqua creek with a burnt orange landscape. It reflects a moment where families are gathered, sharing stories – a theme that runs through this exhibition in Bowral. Old Days, New Days is an annual showcase of Australian female artists, which started in 2022. This time around, the focus is on the role women play in the family unit. Artists include Thea Anamara Perkins, whose paintings often feature family photographs or familial locations, and Rhonda Sharpe, whose textile sculptures depict pets, animals, herself and others in soft, colourful and sometimes humorous ways.

Closed June 14. Free.

Sky, Earth, Water at Bundanon

Curled, warped sheets of corrugated iron perch in a grid format at destination art museum Bundanon in the Shoalhaven valley. It’s one of Rosalie Gascoigne’s key artworks, made in 1986, which makes weathered materials seem alive – frozen in motion. The first woman to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, Gascoigne liked to work with discarded objects, such as old road signs and eroded painted wood, to create impactful sculptures. Sky, Earth, Water displays 20 of her artworks, all on loan from major institutions and private collections. The exhibition also features commissions by three First Nations artists: Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s rustic, metal bush bags dominate one of the gallery walls; a huge woven and hand-dyed installation by Glenda Nicholls evokes the rocky landscape outside; and Janet Fieldhouse’s Non Functional Poo is a playful clay work inspired by cube droppings found around the grounds from wombats that roam the land.

Closed June 14. $12–$18.

Rememory: 25th Biennale of Sydney at AGNSW, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Lewers: Penrith Regional Art Gallery and White Bay Power Station

A giant anatomical heart, encrusted with shiny pearls and red ribbon, dangles from the ceiling at Chau Chak Wing Museum. It’s at the entrance to a room filled with new commissions for the 25th Biennale of Sydney. That includes stunning photographs taken by Melbourne-based Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar and a heartbreaking acrylic poem printed on a large canvas by artist Vernon Ah Kee. The concentration of powerful and complex stories in this room alone is overwhelming, but the beauty of the Biennale is you can take it in at your own pace.

At White Bay Power Station, Marian Abboud’s photographs of veiled women drape from metal beams over old TVs and cars. And Maritea Dæhlin’s looping video of her applying and removing a clay mask captivates. That’s before you see the spectacular 80-square-metre floor canvas by the Ngurrara artists of the Great Sandy Desert at AGNSW. Not to mention artworks and performances hosted at Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Opera House, MCA and other events in Redfern, Marrickville, Granville and Fairfield. Our tip? Explore slowly, one venue at a time.

Closed June 14. Free.

Abdul Abdullah: Soft Power at Ames Yavuz

“Live, Laugh, Love”, “The Show Must Go Wrong”, “Fortune Favours the Old”. Clichéd motivational phrases are blown up, exposed and poked at in Abdul Abdullah’s latest solo exhibition, Soft Power. The Sydney-based artist, whose work is held in numerous public collections and who last year won the Archibald Packing Room Prize, plays with reinterpretations of the sentences we utter, or share online. In this series, words are inscribed across photo-realist depictions of the setting sun, a muscular torso, a lightning strike and Japanese politicians in a bust-up, among others. Each oil painting is an invitation to look again at the way we use language and expression to create, manipulate and appropriate identity.

Closed March 28. Free.

Jess Cochrane: The Middle of the Flower at Sullivan & Strumpf

Impressionism is a clear influence in recent works by London-based Australian artist Jess Cochrane. Each oil painting is filled with symbolism representing her Hungarian heritage. Sunflowers at Corner 75 (2025), for example, references summer and fertility with the recognisable table setting of long-running Randwick restaurant Corner 75. Cochrane says she’s exploring her cultural heritage, family history and heartbreak, which you can feel in I just called to say I love you, an attempted dialogue with a grandfather she’s never met. There’s an oil rendering of the only existing photograph of her grandfather (who came to Australia after World War II and died before she was born) and another of the artist herself, dressed in a suit, which mirrors the pose her grandfather is making.

Closed March 21. Free.

Ron Mueck: Encounter at AGNSW

Curled toes on an elderly woman lying under a beach umbrella. Ribs poking out under the skin of 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.

Until April 12. $32–$35.

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.

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.

Closed February 22, 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.

Closed 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.

Closed April 17. 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. 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.

Closed April 27. $20–$35.

Additional reporting by Emma Joyce.