Springtime feels like the ideal environ for a trip to the gallery. The weather isn’t too hot or too cold. I find myself itching for an opportunity mid-week to entertain a libation on a terrace porch or (oftentimes) spilling out into the street. And around the country, Australian galleries are picking up what we’re putting down.
In Newcastle, the first major Australian survey of Sāmoan/Australian artist Angela Tiatia will be running at Newcastle Art Gallery until early February, and at Sydney’s MCA, one of the country’s most influential contemporary artist, Tony Albert, is showing his newest major exhibition (which will feature works across sculpture, photography, installation, painting and assemblage alongside major new commissions). In Melbourne, we wouldn’t miss the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)’s exhibition Passage: The Art of Atong Atem; and in the Gold Coast, Sydney institution White Rabbit is still showcasing its Chinese Contemporary Art highlights until the 11th.
For all the exhibitions to see around the country this October, read on…
NSW
Robyn Kahukiwa Tena i Ruia, 1987, acrylic on canvas, collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf
Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize (WSSP) – 2 October until 29 November 2026
First established in 2001 and presented by Woollahra Council, this is Australia’s most prestigious award for small-scale sculpture, and the first national acquisitive prize for an original work up to 80cm in any dimension. This year’s field is the strongest yet – 49 finalists selected from 724 entries, local and international.
China Heights
Tactile Illusions Group Exhibition – until 10 October 2026
Benedict dos Remedios, Midori Goto, Yoko Georgiou, Marina Inoue, Eli van Engelen, and Madi Feist come together across painting, textiles, ceramics, and assemblage, pairing playful, heightened aesthetics with an undercurrent of sardonic unease. From exotic flora, underwater-inspired ceramics, and tactile hand-tufted textiles to noir vignettes, surreal liquid-graphite compositions, and suspended assemblage forms, the works create a vivid interplay between decadence, tension, and illusion.
Newcastle Art Gallery
Angela Tiatia: Muse – until 7 February 2027
The first major Australian survey of Sāmoan/Australian artist Angela Tiatia brings together two decades of moving image, photography, performance and installation, tracing how she has used everything from ancient mythology to selfie culture to explore gender, power and representations of the Pacific. It’s joined by The Matildas 2025, her 23-minute video portrait of all 23 players from Australia’s history-making 2023 World Cup squad. This exhibition opens from 5pm on Friday 25 September alongside New Annual 2026, with priority access given to Angela Tiatia: Muse ticketholders. Visit the FIRST NIGHT ART PARTY event page for opening night tickets and lineup details including powerhouse future soul singer Ngaiire leading a night celebrating Pasifika creativity.
Art Gallery of NSW
ສູ້ສູ້ Sou Sou – until 1 February 2027
Acclaimed Sydney artist Mechelle Bounpraseuth has a landmark presentation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, featuring around 150 works for 12-months, where her immersive installation celebrated Lao culture, ritual and intergenerational storytelling through large-scale ceramic works.
UNSW Galleries
The Forests of Symbols – until 22 November 2026
Heather B. Swann’s latest exhibition draws you into a strange and fantastical world of mythology, folklore and symbolism, where owls, frogs, caves and the folkloric ‘green man’ recur across new paintings, sculptures and lithographs. Created as a major new commission, the exhibition plays with the idea that even the most ordinary objects can carry hidden histories and meanings.
Ngununggula
New Religion – until 18 October 2026
A group exhibition bringing together contemporary Australian works, new commissions, and major historical works to explore how symbols of faith persist, evolve, and outlive belief. The exhibition asks why certain images continue to hold
meaning and what forms of authority they retain after systems of devotion have shifted.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s (MCA)
Robyn Kahukiwa: My Ancestors Are Always With Me –14 October 2026 until 7 February 2027
This is the first Australian exhibition dedicated to the Sydney-born Māori painter, Robyn Kahuwika (1938–2025, Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Konohi, Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare).
Vantage Point
Otomys In Residence – 15–25 October 2026
Vantage Point brings seven artists into a single room of a private Paddington house, working across painting, hand-woven Karoo mohair and colour-shifting glass.
VIC
‘What we are given’ (2024) by Atong Atem, courtesy National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
Heide Museum of Modern Art
Brassaï: Secret Paris – until 15 November 2026
The most comprehensive exhibition of Brassaï’s work ever presented in Australia, Brassaï: Secret Paris brings together more than 150 original vintage prints capturing the streets, nightlife and creative circles of 1930s Paris. From iconic nocturnal scenes and portraits of Pablo Picasso to surrealist experiments and pioneering photographs of graffiti, the exhibition offers a rare insight into one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers.
Bendigo Town Hall
Bendigo Art Gallery residency – 1 October until 13 December 2026
Presenting works not seen before in Bendigo, the residency will kick off with Rosie Deacon’s colourful, immersive installation Thrifty Swifty, created from items collected from op shops and art disposal centres. Also presented will be a major work in partnership with ACMI, Australia’s museum of screen culture. CHARGE! Agincourt by Back to Back Theatre is an immersive new exhibition by Geelong’s acclaimed contemporary performance company, Back to Back Theatre. It brings a fresh perspective to the story of Henry V in a new screen commission.
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
Passage: The Art of Atong Atem – 30 Octobern 2026 until 14 June 2027
Through portrait photography, Melbourne-based South Sudanese artist Atong Atem uses her body as a canvas, adorned with textiles, paint, and symbolic objects.
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
Margaret Preston – until 31 January 2027
This retrospective looks at Margaret Preston’s defining influence on Australian modernism, bringing her work into conversation with her contemporaries and artists responding to her complicated legacy today.
Potter Museum of Art
Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the gum tree – until 21 November 2026
Exploring the enduring significance of Australia’s iconic gum tree, Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the gum tree brings together more than 175 works spanning First Nations, colonial, twentieth-century and contemporary art. Alongside five major new commissions, the exhibition considers the eucalypt as a powerful symbol of Country, identity, ecology and cultural memory across generations.
C. Gallery
We Paint Her Face and Make Her Dance – 8 October until 20 November 2026
Following Sydney Contemporary, Fern’s practice returns repeatedly to the female figure – not as subject in any straightforward sense, but as a site of accumulated expectation, projection, and interpretation.
Shepparton Art Museum
Archibald Prize 2026 – until 1 November 2026
Australia’s most famous portrait prize heads to Shepparton for its only Victorian stop, bringing all 59 finalist works together outside Sydney for the first time this year – including Richard Lewer’s winning portrait and a snapshot of the artists, thinkers and cultural figures shaping Australia right now.
QLD
Archie Moore, Kamilaroi/Bigambul peoples, Australia b.1970 / kith and kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale, 2024 / Image courtesy: Archie Moore and The Commercial, Sydney / © Archie Moore / Photograph: Andrea Rossetti / View full image
Queensland Art Gallery
kith and kin – until 18 October 2026
Archie Moore traces his own Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations over 65,000+ years, creating an extensive drawing that captures the common ancestors of all humans alongside animals, plants, waterways and landforms in order to emphasise our kinship responsibilities to each other and our surroundings.
Home of the Arts (HOTA)
This Moment: Highlights from the White Rabbit Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art – until 11 October 2026
Presenting key works from the White Rabbit Collection, one of the world’s most significant and influential holdings of contemporary Chinese art, this extraordinary exhibition features bold, experimental artworks produced over the last 25 years that interrogate authority, reclaim history and reflect profound social change.
Museum of Brisbane
Warrajamba – until 15 November 2026
Quandamooka artist Delvene Cockatoo-Collins will reimagine Museum of Brisbane’s Creative Space into an interactive and immersive realm, exploring the ancestral story of Warrajamba, the mermaid.
SA
Left: ‘(Vanished Scenes) From an Untouched Landscape #10’, 2018, inkjet print on hahnemuhle paper with hole removed to a black velvet void, 25.0 x 25.0cm; © the artist, courtesy of N.Smith Gallery. Right: James Tylor, ‘Kaurna people’, South Australia / Māori, Te Arawa iwi, Aotearoa (New Zealand), born Latje Latje/Barkindji Country (Mildura, Victoria) 1986, Damien Shen, Ngarrindjeri/Kaurna people, South Australia/Chinese heritage, born Tarntanya (Adelaide), Kaurna Country, 1976, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna Michael O’Brien, (Kaurna and Narungga peoples), 2026, Tarntanya (Adelaide), Kaurna Country, Reproduction of tintype photograph on aluminium, 80.0 x100.0cm, Courtesy of the artists
Adelaide Contemporary Experimental
LEAVES: ECO-ANXIETY – until 5 December 2026
Rather than looking only at the physical consequences of climate change, this group exhibition turns to what it’s doing to us psychologically – exploring anxiety, grief and uncertainty alongside the ways we might imagine living differently with the natural world.
WA
Artwork: G F Watts ‘Una and the Red Cross Knight’ (1869). Oil on canvas, 167.3 x 184.7 cm (framed) 134.6 x 152.4 cm (sight). The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased, 1959. Photo: Christophe Canato.
PICA
Soft Grates – until 20 December 2026
Jen Berean and James Carey’s Soft Grates is the fourth in the Judy Wheeler Commission series and invites visitors to contemplate how institutions mark time and hold memory through the presence of water. Continuing their collaborative exploration of architecture, infrastructures and embedded systems, the duo aims to reveal the unseen networks that move water through and around PICA’s location in Boorloo (Perth).
Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA)
Chivalry is dead? – until 21 February 2027
Taking the familiar question of whether chivalry is dead as its starting point, this exhibition looks at how ideas of romance, gender, power and social behaviour have shifted over time – and what those old codes might mean in contemporary life.
Holmes à Court Gallery
Time to Burn – until 31 October 2026
Twelve artists turn their attention to fire and the Western Australian landscape, exploring the complicated practice of prescribed burning and the cultural, ecological and political questions surrounding how we manage Country.
NT
2026 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, installation view at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Photo: MAGNT Kate Travis
Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) – until 25 January 2027
Australia’s longest-running and most prestigious First Nations art prize returns with a powerful exhibition showcasing the work of emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Spanning painting, sculpture, weaving, photography and installation, the exhibition offers a compelling snapshot of contemporary Indigenous art from across the country.
Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
Desert Mob 2026 – until 25 October 2026
One of the country’s most significant celebrations of Aboriginal art returns to Mparntwe/Alice Springs, bringing together new work from emerging and established artists connected to 35 Aboriginal art centres across the NT, SA and WA.
ACT
Artwork: David Hockney (artist), Tyler Graphics (printer and publisher), ‘An image of Celia’, (1984-86), National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002, © Estate of David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd
National Gallery of Australia
David Hockney: Portraits in Print – until 9 May 2027
David Hockney’s portraits take centre stage in this exhibition devoted to his printmaking, tracing the friends, lovers and cultural figures he has returned to across his career and the remarkably intimate way he captures the people within his orbit.
Canberra Contemporary
TAKEAWAY: Tales from the Flavour Superhighway – until 24 October 2026
Food becomes a way into much bigger conversations in this seven-artist exhibition, where the things we grow, cook, eat and discard open up questions around colonisation, cultural exchange, food sovereignty, ecology and waste.
TAS
‘In Absence’ at Mona, by Yhonnie Scarce and Edition Office. Photograph courtesy Mona/Jesse Hunniford. Image courtesy the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)
In Absence – ongoing
Created by Kokatha/Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce in collaboration with architects Aaron Roberts and Kim Bridgland, In Absence is a striking permanent architectural installation overlooking Berriedale Bay. Inspired by traditional eel traps and adorned with 1,400 hand-blown black glass murnong (daisy yams), the nine-metre-high pavilion offers a contemplative space that honours the enduring strength, knowledge and storytelling of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
Dada Muse
Dante’s Divine Comedy – ongoing
A complete suite of 100 authentic water-colour works on paper by Salvador Dali, based on Dante Alighieri’s literary classic of the same name. Over 3500 woodblock carvings are said to have been used in the printing process.
Looking for more ways to fill your month? Check out our comprehensive list of everyone who announced Australian tours in 2026 (and where to buy tickets).
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