‘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

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

Featuring artworks abound with pattern and repetition, for some artists, this visual multiplicity is used to express the more abstract concept of cultural multiplicity, in which the whole is made from many heterogenous yet interlocking parts.

Artists also explore what happens when artistic traditions roam, mutate and brush up against one another. As images are copied and re-copied in different locations, they become enriched by the inevitable mistranslations or ‘glitches’ in the chain of reproduction.

We live in a world of echoes and amalgamations. The artists in ‘A Third Language’ capture this cacophony.

A Third Language exhibition
11 February – 17 September 2023
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 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

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

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

The reconfigured spaces capture major historical moments from first contact to colonisation, and exploration to immigration. Bringing the Indigenous and contemporary Australian collections together with the Gallery’s historical holdings, the display emphasises stories about Queensland and Brisbane from the region’s own perspective.

Major new contemporary works by Helen Johnson, Daniel Boyd, Dale Harding, Alick Tipoti and Sonja Carmichael will feature among celebrated and iconic pieces by Gordon Bennett, Arthur Boyd, Rupert Bunny, William Dobell, Ian Fairweather, Ethel Carrick Fox, R Godfrey Rivers, Sam Fullbrook, Vida Lahey, Sidney Nolan and many more.

We’re inviting visitors to discover a fresh perspective on the Australian Collection with Words & Pictures, our ongoing drop-in drawing activity, inspired by writers and artists.

The Australian Collection is our first step towards returning the Queensland Art Gallery building, as closely as possible, to the intended vision of architect Robin Gibson AO, an expansive, open space with clear sightlines throughout, lending each gallery a beautiful sense of connectedness to the whole. The plan to open up the building enabled us to think of the space in an expansive way. Passers-by in the Whale Mall will again be able to look down into the Gallery through our reopened windows.

Bringing together art from different times and across cultures, we trace narratives of geography — as country, as landscape, as the place we live and work — and we share stories of traversal and encounter, of immigration, colonisation and the expatriate experience.

After 120 years of building the Collection, there are many stories to tell; in doing so, we acknowledge that we live in a country with a complex history. And then we let the works speak for themselves.

Australian Collection Exhibition
Queensland Art Gallery
Now Open – Permanent Exhibition
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au

Among the highlights are paintings by Rover Thomas (c.1926–98), and works on bark and canvas by Jack Wunuwun (1930–91) and John Bulunbulun (1946–2010) that present visual records of their clan manikay (song cycles).

The Perth-based Holmes à Court family collected extensively and secured a vital artistic legacy by developing focussed holdings from individuals and artist groups in this period. Works in ‘Sung into Being’ are predominantly from the Janet Holmes à Court Collection, joined by works from QAGOMA and the National Gallery of Australia.

Sung into Being: Aboriginal Masterworks 1984–94 Exhibition
22 July – 22 October 2017
Queensland Art Gallery
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au