SYDNEY.- Australian artists take centre stage at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2025 with a program featuring a major First Nations winter blockbuster that offers a deep exploration of the celebrated artists of Yirrkala. The year also includes a landmark exhibition showcasing the lives and work of 50 pioneering Australian women modernists, alongside a summer blockbuster of the internationally acclaimed artist Ron Mueck.

Opening on 21 June, Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala will platform the extraordinary artists of Yirrkala, a small Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land that is recognised around the world for the power of its creativity across multiple art forms. Inextricably intertwined with cultural, political and social history, the exhibition is presented in partnership with the Indigenous art centre in Yirrkala, Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka.

Yolŋu power considers the significant moments in Yirrkala’s history from the 1940s to the present when artists have consciously altered their practice, developed new styles or embraced new mediums. A unique exhibition design will bring bark paintings, drawings and prints on paper, and sculpture in both wood and metal together with immersive time-based art experiences. Yolŋu power will highlight familial connections and cultural continuation across multiple generations, while contextualising the work of individual artists within the broader school of artists from Yirrkala and surrounding Miwatj Country, now accaimed not only in Australia but, increasingly, internationally.

Internationally renowned London-based Australian sculptor Ron Mueck will present new work alongside key sculptures from throughout his practice in his largest ever exhibition on home soil, opening 6 December. The comprehensive survey comprises sculptures drawn from across the globe, most never before seen in Australia, including a thrilling immersive work created for its exclusive Sydney showing. Beloved for his intimately observed and exquisitely crafted realist figures, scaled from the minute to the monumental, Mueck tenderly invites us to explore our relationship with the world and other humans. Ever delighting and challenging audiences, he now takes us in new directions to reflect on our tense and anxious contemporary times.

Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala and Ron Mueck are both exclusive to Sydney and proudly supported by the NSW Government through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW. Ron Mueck is presented as part of the 2025–26 Sydney International Art Series, bringing the world’s most outstanding exhibitions to Sydney.

Minister for the Arts, Music and the Night-time Economy and Minister for Jobs and Tourism John Graham said: 'This is a stunning program that will captivate locals and visitors, demonstrating why the Art Gallery of New South Wales is one of the world’s premier galleries.

'I’m particularly excited about Yolŋu power, which will showcase one of Australia’s most revered arts communities and offer a vivid entry point into thousands of years of storytelling and artistic expression.'

Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is co-curated with the Art Gallery of South Australia and opens in Sydney on 11 October, bringing to the fore the art and lives of Australian women who played a vital role in the global story of modernism. The first exhibition of its kind, it features more than 200 works by celebrated artists, including Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, as well as those still under-recognised, such as Eleanor Harrison, Justine Kong Sing, Stella Marks and Helen Stewart. Revealing their dynamic legacy, Dangerously Modern features striking portraits of independent women, images of luxurious interiors and leisure, bustling streetscapes and scenes of industry, landscapes both intimate and epic, and still life paintings that changed the course of Australian art history.

Australia’s favourite art awards return in May, bringing together some of the best portrait, landscape and subject painters from around the country for the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes. Prize winners will be announced on 9 May and go on display to the public from 10 May. Following the exhibition in Sydney, Archibald Prize 2025 and Wynne Prize 2025 finalists will tour to regional galleries across New South Wales and Victoria.

Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand said: ‘Our major exhibition program for 2025 celebrates the richness and diversity of Australian art, from the powerful cultural heritage of First Nations works from Yirrkala, to the trailblazing women artists of Dangerously Modern, and the bold, contemporary vision of Ron Mueck.

'In 2025, the Art Gallery is proud to present a series of significant exhibitions, including a major new commission for the Nelson Packer Tank by Sydney-based artist Mike Hewson, a significant monographic exhibition of the work of Australian artist Janet Dawson, and a new Kaldor Public Art Project. This program, presented alongside our always accessible and free permanent collection, represents both our history and our evolving culture and offers visitors a deeply resonant experience of what it means to create and connect through art.’

Opening on 4 October, the new Tank commission will see artist Mike Hewson completely transform the former wartime oil bunker with an ambitious new installation that showcases the artist’s unique form of social sculpture. Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat will reimagine the Tank as an anarchic and generous sculptural neighbourhood in which visitors can meet, dwell, play, make, perform and explore. Developed by Hewson in his Sydney workshop and constructed from thousands of salvaged objects and materials from a close radius, the project is an experiment in participation, a spirited act of reclamation and regeneration, a radical rework of the legacies of modern sculpture, and a provocation about what a truly welcoming art museum might look like.

From 19 July, the Art Gallery will present Janet Dawson: Faraway, So Close, the first state art museum survey of one of Australia’s pre-eminent painters. With a distinguished career spanning more than seven decades, Janet Dawson is an artist who refuses to be bound by rules and who remains impossible to neatly categorise. A pioneer of both abstraction and realism in Australian art, Dawson sees no contradiction in working between diverse stylistic and aesthetic realms. This comprehensive retrospective will grant overdue attention to an influential Sydney-born artist.

The longstanding partnership between the Art Gallery and Kaldor Public Art Projects will celebrate another milestone in 2025 with Kaldor Public Art Project 38: Thomas Demand, opening on 30 August. For the 38th Project, John Kaldor has invited German artist Thomas Demand to create a new exhibition space in Naala Badu, transforming a SANAA-designed gallery into a labyrinth of floating coloured planes and pavilions to display the Art Gallery’s John Kaldor Family Collection in a whole new light.

Following the establishment of the Art Gallery’s first curatorial position covering both Australian and global First Nations art, High Colour will highlight global perspectives, relationships and synergies featuring work from the collection, including new acquisitions. Opening on 31 May, the exhibition is inspired by Richard Bell’s 2012 work Colour theory and explores the role of colour in creating contemporary interpretations of Indigeneity by artists working in Australia, the Great Ocean region and North and South America. For these artists, colour is identity, belonging, history and inheritance. The exhibition includes works by Sonny Assu, Dana Claxton, Peter Waples-Crowe, Lisa Hilli, Nikau Hindin, Caroline Monnet, Esme Timbery and Gulumbu Yunupiŋu.

Opening on 8 November, And Still I Rise explores the work of a culturally diverse group of women artists living in Australia, many of whom are internationally recognised if less familiar at home. Featuring work from the Art Gallery’s collection alongside new commissions, the exhibition celebrates making and materiality through textiles, painting, metalwork, installation and video. Widening the horizons of contemporary Australian art, the exhibition includes work by Mia Boe, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Jenna Lee, Haji Oh, Bic Tieu and Suzann Victor, among others.

ARTEXPRESS 2025 returns in February and showcases outstanding student artworks developed for the art-making component of the HSC examination in Visual Arts in 2024.

The Contemporary Projects series continues in 2025, highlighting the work of emerging and mid-career artists from New South Wales, and will feature three artist projects by Mitch Cairns (March), Juanita McLauchlan (July), and a third artist (November) co-curated with Artspace and selected from their Studio Program, to be announced in due course.

Two projects made especially for children (and curious adults) will be presented over the course of the year. Opening on 15 March, Hong Kong-based Japanese artist and architect Hikoko Ito’s joyous installation, Happy Birthday 2U2 features 366 mailboxes – one for every birthday of the year. Visitors of all ages are invited to find their own birthday mailbox and take home a special birthday card made by someone born on that date, and make another in exchange. Opening on 6 September, Sydney artist Raquel Caballero invites all to see, touch, play and make – using papier-mâché, textiles and recycled materials – and contribute to a major artwork that will come to life over the exhibition’s duration.

Celebrating 30 years as a public museum in 2025, the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills will reopen late next year, following building upgrades, with an exhibition Chapters: 1970-79 that will showcase Whiteley at the height of his creative powers in the 1970s.