ADELAIDE.- The Art Gallery of South Australia has today announced the twenty-four participating artists in the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength, curated by Ellie Buttrose. Yield Strength will be presented from 27 February to 8 June 2026 as part of the 2026 Adelaide Festival, and feature new works by artists from across the nation:

Robert Andrew • Nathan Beard • Lauren Burrow • Francis Carmody • Mark Maurangi Carrol • Milminyina Dhamarrandji • Matthew Teapot Djipurrtjun • George Egerton-Warburton • Prudence Flint • Brian Fuata • d harding • Matthew Harris • Helen Johnson • Kirtika Kain • Jennifer Mathews • Archie Moore • Josina Pumani • Julie Nangala Robertson • Erika Scott • Joel Sherwood Spring • Charlie Sofo • John Spiteri • Isadora Vaughan • Emmaline Zanelli

Yield Strength will reveal how materials, selfhood and society are tested - and transformed - under pressure. Twenty-four artists will push the boundaries of their mediums to build visual complexity, or contort them to convey the curious side of existence. Remaining attentive to aesthetic details and receptive to the intricacies of life, the exhibition will foster intimacy through layered viewing experiences across the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as partner venues Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Garden.

As exhibition curator Ellie Buttrose comments, ‘The 2026 Adelaide Biennial foregrounds how bodily experience and intellectual wonder are intimately entwined in the experience of art. Yield Strength reflects the diversity of artistic practice across the continent, from finely layered paintings to delicately stratified sculptures and entangled relations compiled in videos.

Their depictions range from intimate bonds between family to human-animal connections, and more complex, dynamic relations between people and the world they inhabit, to propose new ways of being. Artists in the exhibition seek to capture how these connections, regardless of scale, have the power to transform the self,’ Buttrose said.

AGSA Director Jason Smith says, ‘As the country's longest-running survey of contemporary Australian art, the Adelaide Biennial has continuously expanded its audience, garnered national and international attention, and offered a dynamic platform for artists during its 30-year history. The 2026 Adelaide Biennial will feature compelling new works that engage visitors with the materiality of artmaking, offering a captivating and thought-provoking Biennial that underscores the wonder of the ‘real’ in an increasingly virtual world.’

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art remains the pre-eminent and longest-standing survey of contemporary Australian art. As a vital component of the Adelaide Festival since 1990, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial builds on its reputation and commitment to supporting and celebrating innovative and ambitious practices. Each Biennial responds to a different theme or premise and features new and commissioned works by leading contemporary practitioners nationwide. It has created career-defining opportunities for close to 500 artists and has been experienced by more than 1.8 million visitors.

Presented in association with the Adelaide Festival, with generous support received from the Art Gallery of South Australia Biennial Ambassadors Program and Principal Donor The Balnaves Foundation. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and by the Visual Art, Craft and Design Framework, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Ellie Buttrose is Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and was the curator of kith and kin by Archie Moore in the Australia Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. At QAGOMA, Ellie oversees collection development, realises ambitious commissions and delivers thought-provoking exhibitions and collection displays. Ellie has curated: Living Patterns, 2023, focused on artists who deploy abstraction as a political as well as formal device; Embodied Knowledge, 2022, a survey of contemporary Queensland art with co-curator Katina Davidson; Work, Work, Work, 2019, about the entwinement of civic and artistic labour; and Limitless Horizon: Vertical Perspective, 2017, which rethought the impact of drone vision on contemporary art via the bird’s-eye view paintings of First Nations Australian songlines and the floating perspective in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting traditions. Ellie was a member of the curatorial team for The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2024, 2021 and 2018.