Art Guide Australia

As its title suggests, Monet To Matisse: Defying Tradition covers the mid-19th century to the mid-20th—a period of immense societal and industrial change across Europe and North America, not to mention wars, revolutions and the atomic bomb. The many art movements to arise in this time, partly inspired by the pace of change, redefined aesthetic parameters and what we know as art.

French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière doesn’t do anything by halves. He has made his own diamonds from human breath, helped discover an island off the coast of Greenland and endured a days-long, treacherous crossing of the Drake Passage (separating South America from Antarctica). The reason he does this is to seek out places where life has begun: exotic and remote places made of ice, fire and ocean.

Like a bowerbird, Desire Moheb-Zandi gathers materials from her surroundings, transforming them into considered woven distillations of the world she inhabits. Long regarded as decorative and peripheral to fine art, textiles have undergone a significant reappraisal in recent decades. Moheb-Zandi is among a generation of artists demonstrating the medium’s capacity to engage with contemporary ideas while remaining deeply rooted in tradition.

After winning the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) only a year after graduating from the Adelaide Central School of Art, multidisciplinary artist Ida Sophia was faced with a number of decisions not many emerging artists would have to reconcile so early in their professional career. Sophia’s moving-image work Witness (2022) depicts a captivating durational performance, recreating a baptism in the waters of The Pool of Siloam in South Australia.

Between Kindle updating outdated pop-culture references in books, Disney censoring scenes in older movies and the conveyer line of reboots, remakes and sequels, memory and nostalgia are not only a valuable commodity in the digital age, but susceptible to outside revision. This year’s Primavera exhibition arrives at a perfect moment, inviting audiences to examine the nature of memory, rifle through archives and reconsider the truths of the past.

Dr Ryan Presley’s Our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed (2026) wins the 2026 Telstra Art Award, valued at $100,000.

It takes more than 70 metres of wall space to contain Arthur Boyd’s magnificent Saint Francis tapestries—one reason the complete series has never been presented in full. This winter, the National Gallery of Australia changes that with Arthur Boyd: Tapestries, a landmark exhibition reuniting all 20 monumental works for the first time. Commissioned by Boyd and woven by Portugal’s renowned Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, the tapestries were acquired by the National Gallery in 1975.

If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could trace the ways museums are responding to our complex world in two main politically ‘safe’ directions. One leans towards technology, with exhibitions that use AI or question the future. Another turns towards family questions, from Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood at Arnolfini in the UK in 2024 to MOTHER at the National Gallery of Victoria earlier this year. I’m not entirely cynical. Or at least, not about this second direction.

Khaled Sabsabi has not slept. It’s a damp, grey Thursday morning in July and the artist is in his Western Sydney studio, hair pulled back, Lebanese coffee in hand. Behind him, a large new painting hovers into view—a work still too fresh, he says, to speak about. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit flat or dry,” Sabsabi says over video call, taking a generous sip of coffee. “I’ve just been working since early morning.

Towards the end of our conversation, Dr. Chaitanya Sambrani, co-curator of Avatar: Forms of Vishnu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), reveals a work in the exhibition that he’s particularly excited about. It’s folios from the oldest surviving, fully illustrated religio-cultural literary epic, the Ramayana. These folios, dated 1594, were made for Hamida Banu Begum, Queen Mother of the Mughal Emperor Akbar.