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

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

Explore traditional Noh and Kogen costume, intricately decorated kimono worn by samurai and merchants during the Edo period, early examples of Western influence in the styles of the late nineteenth-century, and Japanese modernist fashion from the early twentieth-century. Additionally, the exhibition features key pieces by fashion innovators Issey Miyake and John Galliano, contemporary creative Hiroko Takahashi and bold Harajuku street fashions.

Alongside unique examples of kimono and kimono inspired costume the exhibition features paintings, posters, wood block prints, magazines and decorative arts that contextualise the themes of the kimono story. It presents the diverse skills mastered by traditional artisans including shibori tie dye, rice paste resist designs and indigo blue dyeing, and highlights the numerous materials used for textile production throughout Japanese history, including silk, cotton, metallic thread, paper, elm bark, banana tree fibre and deer leather.

Kimono Exhibition
Until 5 October 2025
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Developed by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and presented in Melbourne in partnership with the NGV, Africa Fashion is the largest exhibition of fashions from this region in an Australian art institution to date. More than 50 designers and artists from 20 African countries are represented, from the vanguards who first gained worldwide attention, such as Kofi Ansah, Chris Seydou and Shade Thomas-Fahm – to the newest generation of cutting-edge creatives, including Thebe Magugu, Imane Ayissi, IAMISIGO, and Lisa Folawiyo.

Organised chronologically and thematically, Africa Fashion foregrounds individual African voices and perspectives, as well as the richness of African histories and cultures. Beginning with the African independence movement and the liberation years, the exhibition illuminates the important role of fashion – alongside art, film, literature and music – in the cultural renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.

Photographic portraiture, past and present, also plays a central role, illustrating the relationship between fashion, agency and self-representation.

The diversity and ingenuity of the continent’s contemporary fashion industry is explored in a visually arresting display of contemporary couture, ready-to-wear and made-to-order from the many ground-breaking designers, collectives and stylists working in Africa today. From the minimal to the artisanal to the maximalist to the narrative, Africa Fashion offers a glimpse of the glamour and the politics of this globally influential scene.

Africa Fashion Exhibition
31 May – 6 October 2024
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

A kaleidoscopic exhibition, Pierre Bonnard features more than 100 works by the celebrated French artist, spanning the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Paintings, drawings, photographs, folding screens and early cinema will bring modern France to life with startling beauty and vivid colour. Developed in partnership with Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the exhibition is largely drawn from the museum’s impressive holdings of works by Bonnard alongside significant loans from other collections in France and beyond.

The first sections of the exhibition explore Bonnard’s central role within the Nabi circle of artists, as well as his interaction with the contemporary worlds of music and theatre. Calling themselves the Nabis, the young artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Paul Sérusier and Félix Vallotton banded together in the early 1890s, and saw themselves as the Prophets of a new art that they envisaged encompassing every sphere of modern life – interior design, furniture, fans and textiles, stained glass, and commercial illustration and advertising. Paintings by Vuillard and Vallotton will be shown alongside prints by Denis.

During this period, Bonnard recorded daily life in the streets of Paris in an immediate and startlingly close manner, observing what he called the ‘theatre of the everyday’. Influenced by his friendship with the pioneering filmmakers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, he became one of the first artists to draw inspiration from the new medium of cinema in his art. He also embraced photography and cast his artist’s eye over his family circle to capture moments of unexpected movement and impromptu composition. Films by the Lumière Brothers are screened alongside dynamic urban scenes Bonnard produced during this period.

Bonnard’s meeting with Maria Boursin (known as Marthe de Méligny) in 1893 led to his own domestic intimacy, culminating in a remarkable series of nude studies, both lithographs and paintings. As Bonnard and Marthe shared their life together, this led to longer periods spent in the countryside for Marthe’s health. Alongside his intimate studies of their domestic life, Bonnard undertook campaigns of landscape painting, engaging with the legacy of French Impressionism. Visits to the south of France from 1909 onwards brought a new intensity of colour to Bonnard’s art, ‘this colour that drives one wild’ as he put it. A rich selection of the warm and vibrant interior scenes and still lifes recorded by Bonnard following his move to the south of France form an important part of the exhibition. In the last decades of his working life, Bonnard created works of poignant introspection – self portraits and scenes of his daily life with Marthe – and others of majestic scale and joyous colour, celebrating the luminous landscapes around Le Cannet, the town near Cannes on the French Riviera where he and Marthe lived.

For Pierre Bonnard, the NGV has commissioned award-winning architect and designer India Mahdavi to design the exhibition’s scenography. Described by The New Yorker as a ‘virtuoso of colour’ and ‘possessor of perfect chromatic pitch’, Mahdavi envelops Pierre Bonnard’s works in an environment that complements the artist’s distinct use of colour and texture, and the domestic intimacy for which his paintings are so renowned.

A design icon, Mahdavi has appeared multiple times on Architectural Digest’s list of the world’s 100 most influential architects and designers. Her singular approach to colour, structure and texture has resulted in numerous acclaimed projects, including commissions for hotels, restaurants and retail as well as scenography for exhibitions and fairs, including for Design Parade Toulon and Homo Faber, Venice. Mahdavi engages with both art history and contemporary culture to create a unique exhibition experience with Bonnard’s works. Wall and floor applications, as well as furniture, add a three-dimensional experience to the sumptuous, domestic interior worlds synonymous with Bonnard’s paintings.

Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2023 – Pierre Bonnard Exhibition
9 June – 8 October 2023
National Gallery of Victoria
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum features 44 drawings on loan from the Prado Museum in Madrid, the largest group of Goya’s drawings ever seen in Australia. Ranging from bold ink to delicate red chalk drawings, the works on display have been selected by the Prado especially for this NGV presentation. They include examples from the artist’s earliest albums of social satires through to the enigmatic visions and dreams recorded in his late drawings. This rich and diverse selection of drawings showcases the breadth of Goya’s drawing practice, as well as offering a rare insight into the artist’s image-making process.

The works from the Prado collection are complemented by 120 etchings from Goya’s renowned print series, including the Caprichos 1797–98, which satirised vices and follies in Spanish society; the Disasters of War 1810–15, based on the atrocities of the war and famine that followed the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808; the Tauromaquia c. 1815–16 on the subject of bullfighting; and the enigmatic Disparates c. 1815–19, made during the reign of Ferdinand VII, whose suppression of civil liberties affected the lives of many intellectuals and reformers, including Goya and his friends. The prints are drawn from the NGV Collection with fifteen works on loan from the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Goya: Drawings from the Prado Museum
25 June – 3 October 2021
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

The exhibition title KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness foregrounds the emotional content of the artist’s work. Through his works KAWS celebrates generosity, support for others and the deep need we have for companionship. KAWS represents someone who is very much of our time in terms of working across contexts and in hybrid and collaborative ways, and his work presents an antidote or rejoinder to the increasingly toxic nature of public discourse and social media, and division within and across societies. He reminds us we need one another and that life should be lived as compassionately as possible to combat this ‘Age of Loneliness’, in the face of fear and hatred.

KAWS: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness is a major contribution to the growing international reputation of this contemporary artist. It follows KAWS’s recent solo presentations at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016), the Yuz Museum Shanghai and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017) and the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (2019). This exhibition introduces audiences to the full range of KAWS’s artistic output, including a newly commissioned monumental sculpture (his largest bronze sculpture to date), paintings reworking pop-culture figures and an impressive collection of human-scale sculptural figures. KAWS’s collaborations with other artists will be explored in the exhibition and those with major brands on display in the dedicated pop-up shop along with his own products.

An accompanying publication, available from December 2019, features a situating essay by exhibition curator Dr Simon Maidment and a specially commissioned essay by renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The book documents KAWS’s artistic practice across his whole career and incorporates installation documentation of the NGV exhibition.

KAWS: Companionship in the Age Exhibition
20 September 2019 – 13 April 2020
National Gallery of Victoria
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

In this increasingly globalised world, the exhibition explores photographers’ representations of life in cities as its key theme and presents a journey through the shared aspects of life in the urban environment. The selected works create a picture of collective life around the world and document patterns of mass behaviour. The exhibition looks at the phenomenal complexity of life in the twenty-first century and reflects on the ways in which photographers have documented, and held a mirror up, to the world around us.

Civilization: The Way We Live Now is curated by William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell, assisted by Juliette Hug. The exhibition is co-produced by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis/New York/Paris/Lausanne and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in consultation with the National Gallery of Victoria.

Civilization: The Way We Live Now
13 September 2019 – 2 February 2020
National Gallery of Victoria
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist is the first major exhibition to chart the development of Kemp’s extraordinary career, beginning with his earliest paintings of symbolic landscapes and angular dancing figures, through his work of the 1950s – where the human form is transfigured and becomes part of an abstract structure – to his late works which reveal an artist whose concerns go beyond the physical world.

In Kemp’s later works – highly resolved paintings of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – the geometric structure heightens the symbolic richness contained within. Kemp’s works from this period are charged with great emotional energy and are the pinnacle of an artistic and spiritual journey.

Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist has been developed in close association with the estate of the artist. Comprising paintings, prints and sketches, it is the most comprehensive retrospective of this significant artist’s work since Kemp’s death in 1987.

The NGV is publishing a monograph to coincide with the exhibition that features the artist’s work and new scholarship from Australian experts.

Roger Kemp – Visionary Modernist Exhibition
22 August 2019 – 15 March 2020
NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Keith Haring (American 1958–90) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (American 1960–88) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas and complex socio-political commentary, creating an indelible legacy that continues to influence contemporary visual and popular culture today. Each artist is acclaimed for his distinctive visual language, employing signs, symbols and words to convey strong social and political messages in unconventional ways.

The exhibition surveys each artist’s tragically short, yet prolific career through more than 300 artworks, including works created in public spaces, painting, sculpture, objects, works on paper, photographs and more. Crossing Lines provides local and international audiences with a comprehensive insight into each of these influential artists, as well as an understanding of their broader impact, both in the 80s and 90s and continuing today.

Beginning with examples of both artist’s work from the streets and subway stations of New York City, the exhibition presents works from each artist’s first exhibitions, their collaborations with each other, as well as with the likes of Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and Madonna. It continues by presenting some of their most acclaimed artworks, including pieces featuring Basquiat’s crown and head motifs and Haring’s iconic ‘radiant baby’ and dancing figures.

Curated for the NGV by Dr Dieter Buchhart, art historian and curator of recent monographic exhibitions on both Jean-Michel Basquiat (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Barbican art Gallery) and Keith Haring (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris).

Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat – Crossing Lines Exhibition
NGV International, Melbourne
1 December 2019 – 13 April 2020
www.ngv.vic.gov.au