Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2025 i Art Guide Australia

The work of Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist Agus Wijaya graces the cover of this issue. An Indonesian artist of Chinese background, Wijaya’s intensely-hued artworks draw on numerous perspectives and influences, and explore the inherent tensions of such multiplicity through the use of traditional and new media. This issue also highlights a multitude of perspectives, taking us from Southeast Asia to Europe, from a storm cloud to deep underground, and into an uncertain future of artificial intelligence. Writer Jo Higgins takes us into the Berlin studio of Olafur Eliasson on the eve of the Icelandic-Danish artist’s exhibition Presence, opening in December at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Eliasson muses on the origins and inner workings of this workspace, and lets us in on the thinking behind his new…

Gabriella Bisetto: Skin Deep Canberra Glassworks 6 November—25 January 2026 The practice of Adelaide-based glass artist Gabriella Bisetto has been sustained by the enigmatic perplexity of the human body. Growing up on a farm in regional New South Wales, where Bisetto’s family raised and slaughtered their own animals, the artist had an early acquaintance with anatomy and the transitory states of life and death. Bisetto’s earlier practice was characterised by a fascination with the internal workings of the body, particularly the breath, making this invisible lifeforce tangible through the process of glassblowing. More recently, Bisetto has transitioned her focus to the exterior of the body, shifting her practice to kiln-forming to produce a series of ‘skin’ works that will comprise the exhibition Skin Deep at the Canberra Glassworks. “My aim…

Generational Madeline Gordon Gallery 5 November—29 November For curator Madeline Gordon, the connection between mothers and daughters is a powerful source of inspiration and creativity. “This bond, shaped by shared experiences and generational knowledge, frequently finds its way into artistic expression,” she says. “Whether through writing, painting, sculpture, or other mediums, the complexities and nuances of their connection offer rich material for exploration and reflection.” To explore how these familial bonds might influence creativity, Gordon has brought together three pairs of creative mothers and daughters—Genevieve de Couvreur and Bertie Blackman, Margie and Katie Stackhouse, and Peggy and Sue Pedley. “For some, art becomes a language through which they communicate, bridging generational gaps or expressing emotions that can be difficult to voice. Collaborations may reveal influences and techniques passed down or…

Creating from his Sydney studio, HOSSEI is often thinking about ants. “It feels like I’m making a space for ants,” he reflects. “Ants that have entered a human home, where everything is really large and abstracted, and they feel really small. They’re discovering textures, collecting little treasures, taking them back home. That’s what I love to do with my work—invite people into a space they haven’t been before, where they get to discover something new about themselves.” It’s a strange and playful metaphor, but one that helps to illuminate this warm, world-building practice. HOSSEI’s installations, sculptures, costumes and performances brim with colour and spectacle. Yet beneath the riot lies a quiet ethos of care and togetherness. That ethos is deeply personal. A decade ago, HOSSEI became his mother’s full-time carer,…

Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri ‘anti-disciplinary’ artist (based in Sydney on Gadigal land), whose work has garnered significant accolades in recent years following his earlier training in architectural education. He tells Art Guide Australia that the opening of his solo exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in October, “is exciting because, in every other context so far, I have been a participant in a group relation.” The exhibition—titled Diggermode 2—includes video and sculpture, and will occupy the two front rooms of the IMA. It is a sequel, of sorts, to Sherwood Spring’s earlier video work, Diggermode. The earlier work, for which he won “the churchie” Emerging Art Prize—an Initiative of Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar (Churchie)—in 2023, explored his evolving ideas about living on sovereign land, Australia’s colonial…

It’s not a material, theme or historical period that connects the 59 disparate works featured in The Object Lesson at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)—it’s a person. “You could say it’s about John’s taste, but taste is a discredited word because it’s all about looks. I think this goes deeper,” says Thomas Demand, the acclaimed German photographer and sculptor who has curated the exhibition. “What keeps the show together is John’s curiosity.” “John” is John Kaldor, the art collector and patron who, in 1969, founded Kaldor Public Art Projects, a non-profit organisation that commissions leading artists to create site-specific works in Australia. Among the best known are Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast (1969), a monumental undertaking for which the pair covered 2.5 kilometres of the New South…

ROSAMUND BRENNAN is a Fremantle, Western Australia-based freelance journalist and photographer focusing on culture, travel and society. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Australian, Al Jazeera, The Sunday Telegraph, Qantas Magazine and Delicious, among others. ANNA CARLSSON is a writer born in South Korea, raised in Warrnambool but now resides on Wurundjeri land. She has a background in publishing with an arts and cultural focus and is co-writer of the Substack, Pleasure Principle. STEVE DOW is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer, whose profiles, essays, previews and reviews range across the visual arts, theatre, film and television for The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Sunday Life, Limelight and Vault. BRIONY DOWNES is an arts writer based in Hobart. She has…

Westwood | Kawakubo National Gallery of Victoria 7 December—19 April 2026 A world-premiere exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) brings into dialogue, for the first time, two of contemporary fashion’s most influential figures: British designer Vivienne Westwood and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons. Born a year apart, both challenged conventions of taste, gender, and beauty, redefining what clothing could be. Featuring more than 140 garments—including 100 from the NGV Collection alongside major loans from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Palais Galliera, Paris and Vivienne Westwood Heritage, London—the exhibition traces the convergences and divergences of their practices from the mid-1970s to today. It explores key ideas of punk and provocation, historical reinvention, tailoring and menswear, the politics…

Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi Art Gallery of South Australia Until 18 January 2026 This October, the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) marks a milestone with Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnanthi, a major survey celebrating a decade of bold, community-led Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Since its inception in 2015 under the artistic direction of Nici Cumpston, Tarnanthi has become a national platform—commissioning groundbreaking works, elevating emerging voices and sharing First Nations culture with audiences across the country. Featuring more than 200 works, the exhibition revisits landmark projects from the past decade while sparking new conversations. Highlights include Garry Sibosado’s intricately carved pearl shells In the Back of My Mind (2021) and Darrell Sibosado’s towering steel sculpture Aalingoon (Rainbow Serpent) (2019), which greets visitors in AGSA’s…

Fremantle Biennale: Sanctuary 13—30 November For its fifth iteration, Fremantle Biennale organisers chose the theme sanctuary, wanting audiences to feel “stimulated, empowered, perhaps challenged and accountable as well” when engaging with site-responsive art in collective spaces, says artistic director Tom Mùller. “We wrote a provocation to really elicit and stimulate artists’ thinking around what sanctuary means to them,” he says. “It’s not about folding into a particular brief.” In Pool of Content, Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler are using crystalline salts and a natural dye to create a “surreal” pink lake for Old Customs House, inspired by the bubblegum hues of Lake Hillier east of Esperance and Hutt Lagoon north of Geraldton, caused by salination and particular microorganisms. Considering the history of the Fremantle port being forced upon the landscape,…

With an internationally recognised practice that includes installation, film, paintings, photography, architecture, research and climate-focused social enterprises, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s work explores the scientific, poetic and bodily experiences of light and geography. Over the last three decades, the Berlinbased Eliasson’s work has also examined the role and relevance of art in the world at large. Ahead of his major exhibition at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in December, we visited Eliasson in his Berlin studio, where he spoke to us about gardening, dwelling in uncertainty, the nature of perception and why sometimes you just need to dance disco. “The studio also has a kind of life of itself. Sometimes this life is tangible and it feels alive. Other times it’s more academic or about thought processes, but that…

Describe your practice in seven words? Questions, coded, not real, meaning-making, self-taught, personal. Your first art love? Probably endless doodling as a kid. I had two first ‘art teachers’. Kang (a respectful way to address an older man in Sundanese) Asep noticed how much I loved it and told mum, “Try to make him a doctor or engineer, you can’t.” This is to highlight my supposed love for art, not lack of intelligence. When is the best time of day for creating? At night or in the morning before the day starts. It’s my sleeping time, so there’s less pressure. Do you have any rituals that you do before you start your practice? I’ll eat a little something, have my coffee, then start. When did you first discover anaglyphs (stereoscopic…

“My upcoming show at LON is a very simple idea about creating a kind of stop-motion presentation of five sculptures. The core motif is animated over five sculptures. At the moment, I am thinking of each of them as ‘claws’. Some of these claws may flatten out completely from a closed shape, exploring their differences across five works.” Caleb Shea and I are sitting in one of his studio spaces in the Artery Co-operative on Helen Street, Northcote, Melbourne. Shea has been a member of Artery since 2010, working out of art school studios prior to that. On the way to Shea’s studio, we stopped off at a huge spray-booth, a shared facility, where one of his new works was being given a final coat of paint. “The claw shape…

& Gallery Australia www.andgalleryaustralia.net Bunurong Country 21 Morce Ave, Sorrento, VIC 3943 [Map 1] 0417 324 795 Open daily 10am–5pm. Alun Rhys Jones, Dior A4, 2015, charcoal on stonehenge paper, 76 x 56 cm. 8 November—30 November Ensemble Alice Pulvers, Sophie Pulvers, Lucy Pulvers Greatest Hits: Selected Works 2010–2025 Alun Rhys Jones Forms of Existence Piotr Sobiesiak 6 December—28 December Liminal Horizons Nerina Lascelles Geologica - Coastal Erosion Kate Briscoe The Burden of Love Jesse Thompson Alcaston Gallery www.alcastongallery.com.au 84 William Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000 [Map 2] 03 8849 9668 Thu 12noon–6pm or by appointment. Anna Schwartz Gallery www.annaschwartzgallery.com 185 Flinders Lane, Woiwurung Country, Melbourne, VIC 3000 [Map 2] Wed to Fri 12noon–5pm, Sat 1pm–5pm. 18 October—13 December  Artist of the Monochrome 1968 - 2020 John Nixon Art Gallery of…

Aarwun Gallery www.aarwungallery.com.au Ngunnawal Country, 11 Federation Square, Gold Creek, Nicholls, ACT 2913 [Map 16] 0499 107 887 Daily 10am–4.30pm and by appointment in the evening. Aarwun Gallery is a premier destination for Australian art. We present distinguished landscape and portrait artists, dynamic contemporary voices, and celebrated Indigenous practitioners. Our diverse collection spans painting, printmaking, ceramics, glass, bronze, and sculpture — each work curated for excellence, authenticity, and creative vision. From 19 September Perceptions in Pastel Judy Drew Artists Shed www.artistshed.com.au 1–3/88 Wollongong Street (lower), Fyshwick, ACT 2609 0418 237 766 Tue to Sat 9am–5pm, Sun 11am–4pm. A private gallery by award-winning artist Margaret Hadfield. The ‘Shed’ is a resourceful arts business with quality art materials, art school and gallery. Margaret’s works are on display with local and ‘Shed Artists’…

Araluen Arts Centre, Mparntwe www.araluenartscentre.nt.gov.au 61 Larapinta Drive, Mparntwe/Alice Springs, NT 0870 08 8951 1122 Tue to Sat 10am–4pm Sun 10am–2pm. The Araluen Arts Centre operates as the visual art and performance hub of Central Australia, presenting an annual program of exhibitions, performances, and film. 15 November—8 February 2026 Outback – Greenbush Art Group The Greenbush Art Group is back at the Araluen Arts Centre for their seventh exhibition, Outback. Greenbush Art Group is a collective of artists based at the Alice Springs Correctional Centre that are students or alumni of the Charles Darwin University’s Visual Arts program. The Greenbush Artists use repurposed and recycled materials, such as car parts, cutlery or garden tools to create unique sculptures. In this years’ exhibition, the artists show their new skills in welding…

Ride on, shine on: The East Kimberley Art Movement South Australian Museum Until 14 December The late Kukatja/Wangkajunga painter Rover Thomas is the most famous of the East Kimberley art movement founders, but beside him were generations singing up their Country on canvas boards with local ochres, bush gum and occasional acrylic binders, their songlines committed to memory while working stock routes. Working in the remote Warmun community, Thomas’s influence can be seen in paintings by younger artist Freddie Timms and older artist Queenie Nakarra McKenzie. In the 1950s, McKenzie, who was Thomas’s classificatory mother in the kinship system, saved his life when he was scalped by a kicking horse; she boiled a needle and stitched his head up without anaesthetic. “The surgeon commented her stitches were beautiful,” says independent…

Kate Mitchell: Set States Wollongong Art Gallery 8 November—22 March 2026 Set States at Wollongong Art Gallery (WAG) presents video works by Kate Mitchell, celebrating constructed sets, performative/absurdist gestures, and the levity that is synonymous with Mitchell’s practice. Co-curators Daniel Mudie Cunningham and Louise Brand have connected Mitchell’s works to works from WAG’s collection. This process of bringing artworks into dialogue gave Brand a chance to consider the, “shifting psychological states and states of play in Kate’s practice”. The exhibition centres around Hypnotised into Being (2016). After being hypnotised off-camera, Mitchell responds to a series of prompts describing artworks, such as, “a bronze bust”. Brand explains, “she performs a bodily gesture or facial expression to replicate the prompt.” Brand has selected works from the collection that echo the prompts. ‘A…

A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage): Apichatpong Weerasethakul In collaboration with Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Until 15 February 2026 For A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage), Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents an installation, created with Rueangrith Suntisuk and Pornpan Arayaveerasid, at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). Working between mediums, Weerasethakul has produced a meditation on light, considering the impermanence of images. MCA senior curator Jane Devery remarked, “he is one of those artists who can occupy two worlds: visual art and cinema.” Weerasethakul grew up in Northern Thailand. The young artist would play with flashlights in the dark. There was a disproportionate number of cinemas in his town, and it was from these two experiences Weerasethakul’s interest in cinema grew. A Conversation with…

All That is Alive UTS Gallery, Sydney Until 12 December La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo 25 February—10 May 2026 A multi-disciplinary exhibition co-commissioned by UTS Gallery & Art Collection and La Trobe Art Institute, All That is Alive presents a collection of work that considers what sustains and defines life. Curators Connie Anthes, Stella Rosa McDonald, Jacqui Shelton and Amelia Wallin have commissioned 11 new works in addition to several loans from artists and collectives. Embracing the mediums of dance, weaving, printmaking, sculpture and publishing, the themes of regeneration and growth are common threads throughout the exhibition as artists explore living systems, whether biological, technological, cultural or social. As Shelton explains, connections are made across history through the transference of knowledge and the use of culturally significant materials. “In Dabiyil…

This year has represented a tipping point in the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and creative labour. But despite the fact that AI may be worsening the historical precarity facing artists, the conversation, to me, has failed to addrss the social and emotional consequences for creative workers. Or how they are reframing their vocation in the process. In the second installment in Art Guide Australia’s essay series The Long View, the acclaimed feature writer Stephanie Wood draws on her own perspective—and those of visual artists—to investigate the forces that define this moment. She also asks if the power of art to forge connection will survive this new landscape—and endure. In a world in which the new wave of AI is reframing our relationship with creative labour, how do artists negotiate…

8 Wall Gallery www.8wallgallery.org 8 Soudan Lane, Suite 1 Level 1, Paddington, Sydney, NSW 2021 [Map 10] 0402 888 869 Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, and by appointment. See our website for latest information. We are a new project-based art gallery offering a collaborative space designed to connect people by celebrating artists' practices, cultures, and programming. Exhibitions will run every 4-6 weeks and focus on Indigenous, emerging, and i nternational art. The new model is slowly evolving, with hopes to create a notfor-profit structure in support of artists' projects and participation, such as the upcoming Weaving Project. Annandale Galleries www.annandalegalleries.com.au Gadigal Country, 110 Trafalgar Street, Annandale, Sydney, NSW 2038 [Map 7] 02 9552 1699 Wed to Sat 11am–4pm. See our website for latest information. 5 November—13 December Wäwamanydji: Two Brothers Bambarrarr…

Bett Gallery www.bettgallery.com.au Nipaluna Country, Level 1, 65 Murray Street, Hobart, TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6231 6511 Mon to Fri 10am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–4pm. 24 October—15 November Joan Ross 21 November—13 December Lynne Uptin 21 November—13 December Effie Pryer 19 December—31 January 2026 Summer Exhibition Colville Gallery www.colvillegallery.com.au 30 Collins Street, Hobart, TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6224 4088 Open Thu and Fri, 10am–5pm. See our website for latest information. Devonport Regional Gallery www.paranapleartscentre.com.au paranaple arts centre, 145 Rooke Street, Devonport, TAS 7310 03 6420 2900 [Map 17] Mon to Fri 9am–5pm, Sat and pub hols 9am–2pm, Sun closed. Handmark www.handmark.com.au 77 Salamanca Place, Hobart, TAS 7000 [Map 17] 03 6223 7895 Mon to Fri 10am—5pm, Sat & Sun 10am—4pm. 24 October—17 November New works Adrian Barber 21 November—8 December…

Art Collective WA www.artcollectivewa.com.au Whadjuk Country, 2/565 Hay Street, Cathedral Square, Perth, WA 6000 [Map 19] 08 9325 7237 Wed to Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 12pm–4pm, or by appointment. 1 November—29 November Accretions Penny Coss In Accretions, Penny Coss expands her practice across media, exploring the material agency of geological processes. New glass sculptures are shown alongside raw canvas paintings, revealing a shared logic of heat, gravity and self-organisation. Cast glass forms — including impressions of her geologist father’s tools — evoke fragility, strength and spectral transformation. Through layered pigments, earth materials and textile remnants, Coss reflects on the porous boundaries between matter, memory and self. 1 November—29 November Something from Nothing and Nothing from Something Michele Theunissen Michele Theunissen’s latest body of work is a study in emergence — paintings…