Across four action-packed days, the Fair features live painting demonstrations, an Emerging Artists showcase, and a Children’s Art Studio with free face painting for budding young creatives.

Whether you’re a long-time collector or simply art-curious, it’s the perfect way to discover something you love, connect with artists and galleries, and soak up the creative buzz of Brisbane’s biggest art event.

Affordable Art Fair
Thursday 7 May – Sunday 10 May 2026
Exhibition Building, Brisbane Showgrounds
www.affordableartfair.com

Founded by Jim and Jane Henson in 1955, The Jim Henson Company has created some of the most cherished characters in screen history and continues to revolutionise the art of puppetry for television and film. Their indelible imprint on entertainment, education and popular culture globally is seen in the much-loved series Fraggle Rock and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, the treasured fantasy worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, the iconic characters of the Muppets, and the instantly recognisable residents of Sesame Street.

Immense and immersive, the exhibition will explore the Company’s dynamic trajectory from practical puppetry to today’s animatronic and digital innovations, as well as its ongoing dedication to the craft of creature design and trailblazing developments in on-screen puppeteering. It will feature hundreds of objects, from practical puppets and animatronic creatures to props, costumes, original drawings and moving image clips.

In a world-first, ‘Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company’ will include the Great Hall set from the Emmy Award-winning television series Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, taking audiences behind the scenes of a working puppeteer’s film set.

Make, Believe, Magic – The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company
12 September 2026 – 18 April 2027
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

‘La Suite des Saltimbanques’ is a series of 15 loosely related etchings and drypoints that mark a transitional moment in the young artist’s personal and artistic development. Created on the cusp of Picasso’s Blue (1901–04) and Rose (1904–06) periods, the works are intimately connected with his paintings and drawings of the same era, including the Gallery’s own La Belle Hollandaise of 1905.

On moving to Paris in 1904, 22-year-old Picasso encountered a bohemian crowd of acrobats, jugglers and street performers, whom he sketched as they rehearsed and socialised together. His early depictions focus on the vulnerability and poverty of these itinerant figures, whereas later works pay homage to their strong social bonds and the freedom of their creative lives. Appearing individually and in groups, Picasso’s saltimbanques vary widely in age and fulfil a variety of roles, from clown and friend to mother and king.

Ushering in a lifelong experimentation with printmaking, ‘La Suite des Saltimbanques’ offers extraordinary insights into Picasso’s formative artistic concerns and the social milieu he inhabited at the time. In these sensitive and sympathetic portraits, he conveys the heft of a body, the texture of hair, a playful pose or a tender gesture with remarkable economy and elegance of line, ennobling figures who ordinarily existed on the fringes of society.

Sorcerers from Bohemia – Picasso’s Saltimbanques
14 Feb 2026 – 12 Feb 2027
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Featuring prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition explores the role of photographers as image-makers, and the ways in which women artists create an image of themselves, of others, of the times – from images of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond.

From Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires, the exhibition showcases the works of trailblazing artists such as Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toyoko Tokiwa, Yamazawa Eiko and many more.

The exhibition reflects a recent collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography Collection. Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, photomontage, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light presents the diverse work of women photographers against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events.

Opening in November 2025, the exhibition coincides with the fifty-year anniversary of International Women’s Year 1975, which established the United Nations’ annual celebration of International Women’s Day.

Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light
28 November 2025 – 3 May 2026
National Gallery of Victoria
www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/women-photographers-1900-1975

Walk alongside one of the planet’s most powerful and fascinating animals, on a journey stretching back over 130 million years. This interactive all-ages exhibition will bring you face-to-face with the mighty crocodile. 

From ancient ‘supercrocs’ that once roamed with dinosaurs to the unique crocodile species living across the world today, Croc! Lost Giants to Living Legends explores the science, culture and enduring connections between people and these remarkable creatures.

Crocodiles survived the dinosaurs, evolved and made their mark on culture, fascinating humans from early First Nations’ stories to Hollywood blockbusters of today. Where does the legend and the myth meet reality?

Experts from Queensland Museum, the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory have created this world premiere exhibition. With activities for all ages, you can expect:

• Close encounters with stunning croc models and interactive exhibits including Sarcosuchus, a 130-million-year-old crocodilian.
• Life-sized prehistoric giants and dramatic fossil displays.
• Engaging challenges that test your knowledge of life in croc country.
• Bold and beautiful artworks sharing First Nations connections to Sea Country.
• Global perspectives on crocodiles in culture, design, and tradition.
• Real-world tools used by crocodile researchers and conservationists.

Croc! Lost Giants to Living Legends Exhibition
From 24 October 2025
Queensland Museum, Brisbane
www.museum.qld.gov.au

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson invites us on an expansive multi-sensory journey to the edges of perception. Choose your path through a rocky, primordial landscape, navigate an optical puzzle, or envision the future form of our city.

This Brisbane-exclusive exhibition draws from the three-decade career of one of the world’s most influential living artists. Spanning the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) ground floor galleries, the exhibition will include important early works and expansive site-specific installations, many never before seen in Australia.

From the magical early work Beauty 1993, which suspends a rainbow in a veil of mist, to Pluriverse assembly 2021, a spatial installation that unfurls ever-changing reflections of light, Eliasson’s creations come to life as they meet the viewer’s senses and body.

Two much-loved QAGOMA works feature: the rocky landscape and running water of the immense and immersive Riverbed 2014; and The cubic structural evolution project 2004, a huge all-white LEGO city perpetually built and rebuilt by visitors throughout the exhibition.

Eliasson’s artistic practice is grounded in the distinctive forms of his familial home Iceland, which will be reflected in a selection of photographs of the landscape, light and human experience of the country.

Olafur Eliasson Presence Exhibition
6 December 2025 – 12 July 2026
GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

One of American cinema’s boldest voices, Charles Burnett (b. 1944) has crafted a body of work defined by its empathy, literary interiority and clarity of vision. Best known for his debut feature Killer of Sheep 1977, Burnett is renowned for blending immersive naturalism and poetic lyricism in his textured expressions of the Black experience in America.

Born in Mississippi, Burnett moved to the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles as a child. During his college years, he became a leading figure of the ‘L.A. Rebellion,’ a group of filmmakers that first emerged from UCLA in the late 1960s. This loose collective worked together to create an alternative to Hollywood fantasy, with filmmaking that drew on cinéma vérité and Italian neorealism to capture the rhythms and details of contemporary Black life.

Burnett’s career has repeatedly been marked by setbacks, with three of his five features only officially released decades after their completion due to rights disputes and bureaucratic wrangling. He has nevertheless remained an uncompromising and celebrated cinematic artist, receiving a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ in 1988 and an honorary Academy Award in 2007. His Killer of Sheep is now recognised as a major and widely influential entry in the American film canon, and was voted one of the 50 greatest films ever made in the BFI’s 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

The program brings together Burnett’s feature films — his unofficial ‘Los Angeles cycle,’ as described by the New Yorker — along with a selection of rarely screened short films and his powerful docufiction The Final Insult 1997. It includes the new 4K restorations of Killer of Sheep and The Annihilation of Fish 1999, carefully remastered in consultation with Burnett and presented in Australia for the first time as part of this program.

Charles Burnett L.A. Rebel Retrospective
10 – 22 October 2025
Gallery of Modern Art, Cinema A, GOMA
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Game Worlds is here! Explore major titles like Minecraft, Final Fantasy XIV Online, The Elder Scrolls Online, SimCity, and Stardew Valley, joining iconic titles including World of Warcraft, The Sims, Neopets and the highly anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Spanning over 50 years of play, Game Worlds features more than 30 videogames from the 1970s to today, with 44 playable moments, original builds, rare design materials and hands-on prototypes you won’t find anywhere else.

Discover four new microgames made exclusively for ACMI by Australian developers – from nostalgic dial-ins to playful perspective shifts.

Don’t miss limited-edition Game Worlds merchandise, available only at ACMI, featuring collectibles from Neopets, Hollow Knight: Silksong and The Sims, along with ACMI-produced books delving into The Sims and Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Game Worlds
On until Sun 8 Feb 2026
ACMI, Fed Square, Melbourne
www.acmi.net.au

Beginning their careers in the 1970s working in different countries and cultural contexts, British-born Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo (b.1942), introduced a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion by subverting the status quo. As self-taught, independent practitioners, Westwood and Kawakubo’s affinity lies in their uncompromising originality anchored in a desire for personal freedom, autonomy, and social and aesthetic change. Their unorthodox approaches have similarly questioned conventions of taste, gender and beauty, the body, and garment form and function to change how we think about fashion.

Bringing together works from the NGV Collection with selected important loans from international museums and private collections, the exhibition highlights key collections and concerns, showcasing over 140 designs that explore the convergences and divergences between the two designers’ work. Structuring themes include Punk and Provocation, Rupture, Reinvention and The Body and The Power of Clothes, each considering different ways in which Westwood and Kawakubo have rewritten fashion convention over the course of their careers.

Westwood | Kawakubo Exhibition
7 December 2025 – 19 April 2026
NGV International – Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

The display includes artworks by renowned Brisbane-based painters Vida Lahey and William Bustard and luminaries from the regions, including Kenneth Macqueen and Joe Rootsey. The exhibition explores connections between these artists and others — such as Sidney Nolan and Max Dupain — who travelled to Queensland to explore its histories and subject matter and, in doing so, contributed to the development of a modernist sensibility here.

The exhibition foregrounds the important role that women artists such as Lahey and Daphne Mayo played in fostering artistic practice in the state. Their work features alongside artworks by their peers Gwendolyn Grant, Rose Simmonds and women ceramicists associated with the Harvey School.

A later group of paintings by Margaret Olley, Margaret Cilento, and Jon Molvig points to the more expressive directions that art in Queensland followed in subsequent decades.

Under a Modern Sun – Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s
16 Aug 2025 – 25 Jan 2026
Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery 4
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au