Young Talent and New Commissions: The 2025 Edition of MCA Australia’s Primavera Exhibition Is Here

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia has long been heralded for its support of early-career artists. The gallery presents Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists , a showcase of the next generation of Australian talent. This year, curator Tim Riley Walsh posed a question to five young Australian artists: What does it mean to keep making things in a digital and post-industrial era? From now until March next year, Sydneysiders and visitors to the Harbour City can view their responses in the gallery.

Originally conceived in 1991, Primavera started as a collaboration between the MCA and the late Dr Edward Jackson AM and Cynthia Jackson AM, in memory of their daughter Belinda Jackson. The annual event has since grown to play an influential role in developing and supporting the talents of contemporary artists across Australia.

This year’s cohort demonstrates an intimate relationship with materials and production. The resounding answer to Riley Walsh’s query is that art is a powerful way to connect through tangible means, even in an ever-increasing digital world.

The exhibition is free for MCA members and visitors who are under 18, including school groups. Daily guided tours offer the chance to go deeper with the works and ask questions about the artists and their commissions.

We’ve lined up a cheat sheet for everything you need to know before your visit, including who each of the artists are and what their works examine.

Francis Carmody

Speculative storytelling is at the heart of Francis Carmody ’s practice. Born in Sydney, Carmody now lives and works in Melbourne. In Canine Trap I and II , he investigates traps and trap-making as metaphors for what he sees as the predatory nature of capitalism. Carmody’s large-scale sculptural works seek to understand the past and imagine possible futures.

Alexandra Peters

Alexandra Peters ’s work spans painting, print, sculpture and assemblage – most often coming to life as installations. Blurring the lines between genres, Peters’s work The Infinite Image transforms the galleries into what the artist calls a “staging”, a corporate environment featuring artistic interventions into the museum’s walls and windows in distinctive grey-green enamel.

Augusta Vinall Richardson

Abstract composite sculptures made from sheet and cast metals have become the signature of Melbourne-based artist Augusta Vinall Richardson. With a process that begins as hand drawings or small-scale cardboard and papier-mâché models, her work seeks to celebrate irregularities and imperfections in room-dominating pieces that champion analog fabrication. Richardson’s practice is almost entirely underpinned by an ethics of responsibility for objects.

Keemon Williams

Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam and South Sea Islander artist and curator Keemon Williams ’s practice considers queer, Indigenous and Australian experiences as lived in the shadow of colonisation. An examination of labour and culture, his work for Primavera 2025 explores art as an industry and artists as its machines. Williams outsources the making of 999 aluminium boomerangs as a critical gesture, asking us to reflect on how demands of productivity and efficiency are unsustainable for artists.

Emmaline Zanelli

Combining elements of video, photography, sculpture and performance, Emmaline Zanelli is influenced by absurdism and surrealism in her practice. Based in Adelaide, Zanelli seeks to bring humour through her work, considering themes of labour and youth culture in a multi-disciplinary approach. Her works I take care of what’s mine and Magic Cave examine the lifestyles of FIFO and mining workers and their families based on her experience in Roxby Downs, the service town for the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia.

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists runs until March 8, 2026, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. More information and tickets can be found at mca.com.au.

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