Displaying a passion for art early on, Ramsay entered the National Gallery School in Melbourne at 16. Spending time in Paris as a young man, he worked from a studio in Montparnasse for much of 1901–02 and had four paintings selected for the New Salon in Paris in 1902, an exceptional feat for an emerging artist.

Ramsay was close to his family and featured them in his work, the most notable being those of his sisters, Jessie, Margaret and Nell. Two of them feature in one of his most accomplished paintings, Two girls in white (or The sisters) 1904. Other paintings in the exhibition have not been shown in a retrospective context before.

Hugh Ramsay Exhibition
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
30 November 2019 – 29 March 2020
www.nga.gov.au

In the early twentieth century Picasso became a colossus of Modern Art. Many of the younger generation of avant-garde artists who had initially been inspired by Matisse and Fauvism turned to Picasso for inspiration. Over the years he explored the seemingly endless stylistic possibilities for art of the modern era. Revered and emulated, for much of his career Picasso appeared like an immovable object that blocked every move forward for art’s pathway. Others could only follow suit. The exception was Matisse.

Matisse & Picasso begins with the young Picasso settling in Paris, where he was determined to make a name for himself. Taking radical steps towards Cubism, Picasso confronted the older Matisse who was then renowned as the radical leader of the Fauves. The exhibition ends with Picasso’s artistic response to Matisse’s death. Mourning the loss of this most significant figure, Picasso acknowledged the immense stylistic influence Matisse had on his own artistic career.

Despite Picasso’s competitive bravado and resistance, Matisse’s creativity enticed, disturbed and ruffled him. The large paintings Matisse made in the first decade of the twentieth century relating to music and dance proved irresistible for Picasso. Enticing and seductive in their brilliant palette, Matisse’s beauty of line and decorative qualities, his blending of forms and their surrounds showed Picasso a way out of the self-imposed confines he had set himself with the tiny brushstrokes, limited palette and static forms of Analytic Cubism. For Picasso, when Matisse was at his most dynamic his art was radical and his talent was dangerous.

This exhibition follows the paths these two artists took over decades as they responded to the other’s work. No one was more watchful of Matisse’s art than Picasso and vice versa. Both explored pictorial issues in unique ways, but always remained on guard while looking over their shoulder at the other. Both Matisse and Picasso felt the absolute necessity to acknowledge and absorb the concept and skill of each other.

Matisse​ & Picasso Exhibition
13 December 2019 – 13 April 2020
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

In mid-nineteenth century Britain, a group of rebellious young artists emulated the spirit of early Renaissance painting in protest against the art establishment of the era and society at large. Radically flouting convention, these artists revelled in the use of brilliant colour, meticulous detail and exquisite layering. The Pre-Raphaelites drew inspiration from the great love stories of history and literature, the tempestuousness of lustful entanglements, and the wonder of religious icons. They created a new artistic genre, sometimes poetic and sexy and sometimes raw, that combined medieval romanticism with modern life to produce literary scenes, portraits and landscapes rich in symbolism.

Love & Desire features 40 of the Tate’s most famous and best-loved works, alongside 40 loans from other British and Australian collections. With masterpieces such as John Everett Millais’ Ophelia 1851–52 and William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening conscience 1853, this exhibition is a stunning survey of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

These masterpieces are rarely lent, most have never been seen in Australia before and the exhibition represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunit

Love & Desire Exhibition
14 December 2018 – 28 April 2019
National Gallery of Australia
www.nga.gov.au

The exhibition explores Cartier’s glittering international clientele that included royalty, aristocrats, socialites, and stars of the stage, cinema and music. Highlights include Dame Nellie Melba’s diamond stomacher brooch, the Queen’s “Halo” tiara, worn by Kate Middleton at her wedding to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Daisy Fellowes’ Tutti-Frutti Hindu necklace, Barbara Hutton’s imperial jadeite necklace, Princess Grace of Monaco’s 10.48-carat diamond engagement ring, Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond and ruby necklace (a gift from her third husband Mike Todd which also doubles as a tiara) and a selection from the NGA’s exceptional Ballets Russes costumes.

As well as an intriguing array of Cartier jewellery, timepieces and precious objects, the immersive exhibition will include a selection of original preparatory drawings, as well as portraits, historic photographs, film, advertising material, jewellery-making tools and equipment to provide insight into the history of Cartier.

Step into the dazzling world of the Maison Cartier and its clients and discover the age of glamour and icons of style through our program of talks, tours, events and beautifully curated, fully illustrated catalogue.

Cartier: The Exhibition
NGA – Canberra
30 March – 22 July 2018
www.nga.gov.au

Brave New World: Australia 1930s encompasses the multitude of artistic styles, both advanced and conservative, which were practised during the 1930s. Included are commercial art, architecture, fashion, industrial design, film and dance to present a complete picture of this dynamic time.

The exhibition charts the themes of celebrating technological progress and its antithesis in the nostalgia for pastoralism; the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ and consumerism; nationalism and the body culture movement; the increasing interest in Indigenous art against a backdrop of the government policy of assimilation and mounting calls for Indigenous rights; the devastating effects of the Depression and the rise of radical politics; and the arrival of European refugees and the increasing anxiety at the impending threat of the Second World War. Brave New World: Australia 1930s presents a fresh perspective on the extraordinary 1930s, revealing some of the social and political concerns that were pertinent then and remain so today.

Brave New World: Australia 1930s Exhibition
NGV Australia, Federation Square
14 July – 15 October 2017
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Versailles: Treasures from the Palace will be on show in Canberra from 9 December 2016.

More than 130 paintings, intricate tapestries, gilded furniture items, monumental statues and other objects from the royal gardens, and personal items from Louis XIV to Marie Antoinette, will bring to life the reigns of three Kings, their Queens and mistresses in a fascinating and often tumultuous period of French history.

The exhibition will celebrate the lives, loves and passions of the people of Versailles through a full program of activities including music performances, children’s programs and public events.

The exhibition contrasts small personal items, such as the precious golden reliquary which belonged to Louis XIV’s mother, or Marie Antoinette’s hand-crafted chair and harp, with huge works including six-metre tapestries from the most important Gobelins series ever produced for Louis XIV.

Versailles – Treasures from the Palace Exhibition
9 December 2016 – 17 April 2017
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, outer suburban Boston. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1958, then moved to New York. ‘I never really wanted to become an artist. But, I did want to make things’, he confessed in a conversation with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Adam D Weinberg on 7 March 2014, and an interest in contemporary events followed. Like many young artists in immediate postwar America, he was initially smitten with artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. Unlike other young artists, though, he achieved almost instant notoriety soon after graduating when, in 1959, he astonished the art world with the sombre, pure forms of his Black paintings, heralding the arrival of minimalism. Stella’s career, however, followed an unexpected trajectory in his search to validate and renew abstraction, finding new imagery that not only embraces shape, space and colour but also, to the surprise of many, decoration.

In a series of lectures at Harvard in the first half of the 1980s, Stella drew parallels between the ‘tepid’ Renaissance of Nicholas Poussin, which necessarily led to Baroque art, and the crisis of postwar abstraction, which he thought also needed to find a new impetus to retain its pre-eminence in the ever-changing world of modern art. The desire to avoid an art style he likened to a ‘slug of lead’, referring to the High Renaissance artist Poussin, and, instead, find a passion to ‘fill the void’, as Caravaggio had done, took Stella on a journey of remarkable invention. In his search for this new path for abstraction, he experimented with highly dramatic and almost narrative forms from the late 1950s onward.

The survival of abstraction in a viable form was important for Stella, but the divergent extremes of his evolving body of work left many of his early enthusiasts shaking their heads as he travelled from understated geometric forms to a fully blown Baroque style with a suggestive, dramatic expression and an enveloping sense of space. Early on, he had rebelled against the perception that he had been instrumental in introducing a minimalist language, and his career was characterised by a reaction against this unwanted mantle of purity.

Yet, there is consistency in Stella’s work. An underlying ‘spring-loaded’ tension and dynamism has always characterised it, from the early Black paintings of his youth to the more off-the-wall extravaganzas of recent years. His art chronicles a lifetime of experimenting with abstraction, and it is this narrative that was the underlying current of his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2015.

ut some critics still considered his later contributions a total lapse of taste. Ben Davis, in his review for artnet on 3 November 2015, agreed with critics who ‘don’t much like the swollen theatrics of Stella’s late works’. These ‘late monsters’, for Davis, took up far too much space, were too adventurous and far too dramatic, although he also conceded that the casual art viewer might well find them more to their liking. Jason Farago, on the other hand, recognises Stella as an artist who continues to explore new ideas, untrammelled by his earlier success. In his review in the Guardian of 29 October 2015, he writes that it is Stella’s ‘boundless and commendable evolution, rather than some static mastery, that is the mark of Stella’s seriousness’.

The criticism that Stella should have moved to parlour-sized works in a more conventional form failed to appreciate the bravura of an artist still intent on seeking new ways to give life to the art of abstraction. It’s this exploration that the Frank Stella: Saving abstraction exhibition will present for audiences to discover.
Jane Kinsman
Extract from Artonview, issue 87, Spring 2016

Frank Stella – The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection Exhibition
19 November 2016 – July 2017
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

In common with many of us, Hall sees these as failed states, as ‘a minefield of madness, badness and sadness’ stretching beyond the foreseeable future. Hall’s lifelong passion for the natural environment can be felt intensely in works that respond to our persistent role in its demise, or to the perilous state of various species.

Hall’s seemingly random conjunction of things in a wunderkammer-like installation appeals to our human impulse to make connections, or perhaps a propensity for paranoia born of the deep uncertainty and fear of our times. Yet despite a prevalent darkness, Hall’s exhibition is fundamentally life-affirming, its own vitality in perverse distinction to the subjects it ranges across, which provide rich pickings for Hall’s extraordinary transformation of materials, images and objects.

Fiona Hall – Wrong Way Time Exhibition
22 April – 10 July 2016
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

This extraordinary exhibition brings together Tom Roberts’ most famous paintings loved by all Australians. Paintings such as Shearing the rams (1888-90) and A break away! (1891) are among the nation’s best known works of art. An exhibition for all Australians, it is not to be missed.

The Tom Roberts exhibition takes place during an exciting period of change at the NGA, including a large-scale rehang of almost every work of art, with Australian art taking pride of place in a new location. Rediscover your NGA!

Tom Roberts Exhibition
4 December 2015 – 28 March 2016
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

Tom Roberts 30sec TVC from National Gallery of Australia on Vimeo.

It celebrates Skyspaces, viewing chambers that affect our perception of the sky, and surveys Turrell’s life work, Roden Crater, a naked eye observatory in an extinct volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert, Arizona. The exhibition follows three highly successful shows throughout 2013—at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Guggenheim in New York—with works from LACMA’s tour and spectacular installations purpose-built for Canberra.

Since the 1960s James Turrell has made art from light. He studied mathematics and perceptual psychology, and his background as a Quaker and training as a pilot also inform his practice. After his first sculptures using fire, Turrell began to construct projections that produce illusionistic geometric shapes. Afrum (white) 1966, for example, appears as a hovering cube of light.

Raemar pink white 1969 plays with our perceptions, like a large, luminescent pink canvas levitating in front of a wall. Turrell uses a range of fluorescent, tungsten, fibre-optic, LED and natural light. His art is now located across the globe in permanent installations in museums and private collections—Within without 2010, the Skyspace at the National Gallery of Australia, is one of the most beautiful.

In the 1980s and 90s Turrell developed works that expose visitors to total darkness or isolate an individual in a contained environment. After green 1993 is an immersive installation: its intense red, with soft and hard edges, make it disorientating and exquisite. Bindu shards 2010 is a light cycle for one person, a bodily kaleidoscope with patterns of crystals, shards of light, stars, galaxies and nebulae. This Ganzfeld is part of Turrell’s largest and most marvellous series to date. Once inside, saturated in colour, with no edges or corners, we are uncertain of our surrounds—a feeling akin to walking on clouds. This is contemporary art as you’ve never seen before, and promises an experience not to be missed.

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing yourself seeing is a very sensuous act—there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

James Turrell: A Retrospective Exhibition
13 December 2014 – 8 June 2015
National Gallery of Australia
www.nga.gov.au