From Bark to Neon: Indigenous Art from the NGV Collection celebrates Indigenous art in Australia.

Colony: Frontier Wars explores the period of colonisation in Australia from 1788 onwards and its often devastating effects on First Peoples.

NGV Australia hosts two complementary exhibitions that explore Australia’s complex colonial past and the art that emerged during and in response to this perio

Past Legacy: Present Tense looks at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists from city and bush studios who have made their mark by reinterpreting and transforming semiotic signs and customary…

The 1930s was a turbulent time in Australia’s histor

Discover the works of a broad range of Indigenous women artists whose practice is unbounded by convention. Bold statements explore colour and assert the politics of identity.

Since 2002, David and Anita Angel have gifted to the NGV over 100 contemporary Indigenous works, which are displayed together for the first time in Artist’s Hand: Collectors’ Eye: The…

Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus is a two-channel, live-action video that is inspired by the colonial nineteenth century panoramic wallpaper, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804–05), produced by…

This exhibition of new large-scale photographic works draws attention to the devastating impact, truth and reality of the colonisation and Christianisation of the Pacific.

Australian Rules Football has taken over the NGV! The Hermannsburg Potters have created twenty pots depicting some of the AFL’s best and finest Indigenous players from all eighteen team

This exhibition presents John Wolseley’s exploration of the waterways and wetlands of Australia, a subject he has developed over the past six years, in a major series of monumentally-scaled works on paper. Over twenty large-scale works (three, six and ten metres in length) investigate the varieties of Australian water-forms, from mangrove swamps in Roebuck Bay, Western Australia to the flood plains of Garannalli in the Northern Territory, the Finke River in the Simpson Desert (South Australia) and the sphagnum swamps of Skullbone Plains in Tasmania. The works map the different geographical features and unique plant and animal forms of these wetlands in the finely detailed drawing and richly coloured, atmospheric watercolour washes that characterise Wolseley’s work. Environmental concerns and the indigenous significance of these sites are key to any readings of these works, as is the artist’s interest in evoking concepts of evolutionary time and the emotional connection or disconnection people feel with the

Sue Ford was a pioneer of Australian photography, and one of the most important practitioners to emerge in the wave of 1970s feminist photographers. This retrospective exhibition celebrates her artistic life and career. It brings together key photographs, digital prints, collages and films created over an almost fifty-year period, as well as important archival materials.

NGV Collection Focus

During the 1990s, Indigenous Australian women emerged as artists of astonishing innovation and eloquence, a phenomenon that has positioned them at the forefront of contemporary Indigenous art practice. The eight senior Indigenous masters of light and colour represented in this special NGV Collection Focus inform their paintings with profound knowledge and cultural memory of Country and its sanctity. The works evidence the artists’ embodied experiences that are both physical and mnemonic and which predated European contact and its consequent cultural and intellectual assail. These intrepid practitioners of contemporary art have simultaneously come to the fore in two distinct cultural and geographical regions of Indigenous Australia: the vast inland deserts and a tiny island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queenslan

A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition

This exciting exhibition draws upon diverse material from across all areas of the NGV’s rich collections to explore a range of living religious traditions found in the Victorian community today.  With over 50 works of art, many rarely exhibited before, dating from the medieval period through to the contemporary, the exhibition looks afresh at religious practice and belief as seen through the eyes of artists past and presen

The National Gallery of Victoria believes that it is vital to honour the art and culture of the Pacific so that it will be perceived here in Melbourne as one of the world’s great art traditions that continues to develop and is open to change. To that end the NGV opened its first Oceanic gallery at NGV International in December 2003. The Oceanic gallery enabled the NGV to create a Pacific presence on the ground floor but the scale of the permanent gallery did not do justice to the importance of Pacific Islander art or to the NGV’s vision for the Asia Pacific region that embraces Indigenous Australia, the Pacific and Asia. On 28 May 2011, synchronous with the NGV’s 150th anniversary, the Gallery opened to the public a modern permanent space dedicated to art of the Pacific with a special focus on the work of living artists. In this dynamic white cube, art of the Pacific moves out of its darkened cul-de-sac and into a light-filled 21st century space with a 5 metre ce