Curated for Summer: Art Exhibition Highlights

There is no better time to enjoy visiting an art gallery than across the end of year holidays. Over the summer, galleries provide an opportunity to slow down, catch up with friends and family and cool off on the hot days. This summer there is an inspiring line up of exhibitions across Australia, which capture the season’s energy and diversity. From contemporary sculptures and installations to thoughtful retrospectives celebrating women artists, these exhibitions promise something for every art lover. Here are a few highlights to add to your summer itinerary.

NELL: FACE EVERYTHING
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen
11 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Face Everything is a major survey exhibition that will transform the Heide Museum with the artist’s humorous, joyful and comical works. Sydney based artist Nell, draws on the history of Heide and its surrounding gardens, embedding her characters and beloved ghost icons into the space, considering the site as a place of shelter, memory and shared experience. The exhibition comprises over eighty-five artworks, fifty of which are new works. The motifs used include birds, snakes, apples, leaves and eggs, which are employed across a variety of mediums such as tapestries, mosaics and sculptures. These works will reflect the desire of John and Sunday Reed, founders of Heide, for the house to be a ‘gallery to be lived in’. In response to this vision, Nell says ‘my extended family of characters and spirits will inhabit Heide Modern. Together, they hold space for celebration and joy, complexity and grief, and everything in between.’

DANGEROUSLY MODERN: AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ARTISTS IN EUROPE 1890-1940
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
11 October 2025 – 15 February 2026

This travelling exhibition was first presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia beginning in May this year and has now moved to Sydney. This exhibition is shining a light on the art and lives of fifty groundbreaking women artists from the twentieth century. It reveals how an unprecedented number of women artists prevailed against social constraints and left Australia to pursue international professional careers, playing an integral and often overlooked, role in modernising Australia. This is the first major exhibition to focus on the essential role of these Australian women in the emergence of international modernism. With over two hundred artworks, the exhibition features both celebrated and rediscovered paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and ceramics and explores modern art movements such as realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism and abstraction. 

PRUDENCE FLINT AND JOHN BRACK: ALL ANGELS
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
26 September 2025 – 26 March 2026

This exhibition brings together the work of two celebrated Melbourne artists, Prudence Flint and John Brack. Known for their distinctive artistic styles and painterly precision, these two artists explore the human figure with meticulousness and psychological insight. Focusing on artworks developed through the close observation of models in their studios, the exhibition highlights paintings and works on paper that reflect each artist’s continued engagement with the human figure. In John Brack’s works, the nude was a recurring subject used to challenge traditional notions of the genre and the works on display reveal the distinct aesthetic shifts in his practice overtime. In contrast, Prudence Flint’s approach is informed by traditions of figurative painting and the representation of women throughout art history, with a focus on portraits of women in interior spaces. Shown together, the exhibition offers a compelling conversation across time, connected by their shared dedication to the human figure, the studio practice and the complexities of representing women.

NEW DIRECTIONS – PRINTS BY AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ARTISTS 1960s-2000s
Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong
15 November 2025 – 22 February 2026

New Directions explores the creative responses of Australian women artists to the cultural and sociopolitical shifts that impacted their lives in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the artists in this exhibition were pivotal to the revival of printmaking during the 1960s which saw the broader participation and acknowledgment of women artists in the production, teaching and promotion of Australian printmaking. These women artists were also at the forefront of new printing techniques and art movements, including screen printing, Abstraction and political art. This exhibition is drawn from prints held in the Geelong Gallery and Colin Holden collections and celebrates the 50th anniversaries of the United Nations International Women’s Year and Australia’s Women’s Art Register.

By Amanda North, Senior fine art Specialist

Top Image: Nell in her Powerhouse Museum studio, photograph by Mark Pokorny.

December 2025