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

The exhibition includes 130 works, across painting, prints, sculpture, installation and video, from an artistic practice centred on truth-telling around the environment, historical government policy affecting Indigenous Australians, and institutions that collect First Nations cultural material and remains.

The title ‘mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri’, translated as ‘tomorrow the tree grows stronger’, is taken from a poem in Waanyi language by the artist’s son Otis Carmichael.

Just as a young tree grows in strength, the act of reclaiming and voicing Indigenous language encourages a regeneration of culture.

mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson Exhibition
23 March – 11 August 2024
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Emerging more than two millennia ago in Han dynasty China the delicate technique known as gongbi (meticulous brush) was prized for its technical precision. Its influence flowed across central Asia to Persia, and India where the technique was used to document historical events and to illustrate legendary and poetic tales.

This rich cultural inheritance, spanning the breadth of the Asian landmass continues to provide a fertile source of inspiration for artists exploring figuration and narrative in a contemporary context.

Fine Lines exhibition
25 September 2021 – 22 May 2022
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10) will include 69 projects with new and recent work by more than 150 emerging and established artists, collectives and filmmakers from more than 30 countries. It includes works of art that are by turn highly personal, deeply political, and full of joy.

Including major new and recently commissioned works, APT involves a great depth of research by the Gallery’s in-house curators working collaboratively with a network of artists across wide and diverse geographies from Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

As visitors to past APT’s will anticipate, the expansive onsite exhibition experience across both our galleries, QAG and GOMA, features a great wealth of materials and techniques, from large-scale installations and immersive multimedia artworks to sculpture, textiles, paintings, photography and video. APT10 will include three curated cinema programs, interactive artist projects for children and families, plus onsite and virtual events including Up Late and a closing weekend Festival.

APT10 opens on Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 December, with a weekend long celebration that will highlight the diversity and vibrancy of art and creative practice from the Asia Pacific region. Join in on free opening weekend events including art-making workshops, performances and virtual talks.

The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
4 December 2021 – 25 April 2022
QAG and GOMA
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

The exhibition brings together seventy works including barks, paintings, ceremonial and historical objects, draft illustrations from his children’s book and three story book films. Roughsey was a figurehead and pioneer of Indigenous art and culture, throughout his career he explored traditional practices, stories and ceremonies, social effects caused by missionary activity, everyday life on Mornington Island, and his journey through Cape York.

‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ is a collaboration between Cairns Art Gallery and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land
30 March – 18 August 2019
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Pene has an obsession: he endlessly catalogues boss drovers in portraits that vividly evoke the resilient, determined spirit of the rugged individuals responsible for moving thousands of livestock and teams of stockmen and cooks along the great pastoral stock routes of Australia, travelling over vast distances from station to market, or finding feed and water in times of drought.

Boss Drovers will tour to regional venues in Queensland from January 2019: Dogwood Crossing Miles | Logan Art Gallery | Artspace Mackay | Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery Townsville | Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery | Redland Art Gallery | Gympie Regional Gallery | Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery | Caboolture Regional Art Gallery | Warwick Art Gallery | Hervey Bay Regional Art Gallery

Robert MacPherson Boss Drivers Exhibition
29 September 2018 – 24 February 2019
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

The exhibition will continue the Gallery’s commitment to presenting major exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous Australian art.

One of the most exciting Australian artists working today, Tony Albert interrogates representations of Aboriginal people through a mix of humour and poignancy.

Tony Albert Visible Exhibition
Queensland Art Gallery
2 June 2018 – 7 October 2018
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

An eclectic mix of documentary, drama and escapist fantasy, these films transplanted topical narratives of shifting gender, race and social values to the dramatic foreign landscapes of Africa, the Middle East, the South Seas and Asia.

‘Exotic Hollywood’ brings together a selection of these films drawn from the time between World War One and World War Two, when international tourism was still only accessible to the affluent. It offers insights into the American imagination and its conflicted relationship with cultural, racial and sexual views of the time.

It depicts thrilling, if not accurate, tales of adventure and heroism that enticed audiences with dreams of an unspoiled Eden where, after the horrors of World War One, freedom and redemption were possible.

Exotic Hollywood
4 – 28 February 2018
GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

The program features works that reflect on humanity’s engagement with the natural world and built environment; portraits of public and private personalities made from home recordings; visual essays and compilations that mine material appropriated from news agencies, advertising and popular cinema; and pioneering collage films that juxtapose found footage from disparate sources. Connecting the various works is a desire to understand the world through poetic forms of montage.

The program takes its inspiration from Alain Resnais’s short film Toute la mémoire du monde 1957 that explores the limits of human memory through the rigorous cataloguing and organising of collections at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The program is presented in four overlapping thematic sections: ‘Travelogues’, ‘Home movies’, ‘Hijacked media’ and ‘Ready-made cinema’. Each grouping sees artists and filmmakers move deftly through visual and political histories, cultures and environments, and map a deeply personal view of the human condition.

All the World’s Memories
5 January – 24 February 2018
GOMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Picasso once said of the role of an artist, ‘it’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is’. He identified himself, along with his own sense of artistic creativity and sexuality, with the mythical figure of the Minotaur. Nowhere is the link between the artist and ‘the untamable beast’, to use Picasso’s words, more apparent than in the ‘Vollard Suite’. In these prints the major emphasis was devoted to transformations of the artists into his alter-ego, the Minotaur.

As with the subject of the Minotaur, Picasso’s interpretations of Pygmalion were autobiographical in tone, and his view of himself as an artist and lover figured largely in depictions of this theme in the ‘Vollard Suite’ – as does his muse Marie-Thérèse Walter with her extraordinary ‘classical’ countenance.

This iconic suite of prints will be shown alongside selected works from the QAGOMA Collection.

‘Picasso: The Vollard Suite’ is a National Gallery of Australia Exhibition.

Picasso the Vollard Suite Exhibition
2 December 2017 – 15 April 2018
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au