PERTH.- This December, The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) invites you to wander through a gallery full of friends, families and lovers drawn from the State Art Collection (SAC).

Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art brings together some of the most recognisable works in Australian art history alongside vibrant contemporary acquisitions to reveal how artists have mapped the messy, magnetic and sometimes exasperating ways humans connect—or don’t.

Highlights on display include Frederick McCubbin’s Down on his luck and Moyes Bay, Beaumaris, Hans Heysen’s Droving into the light, Arthur Streeton’s The hillside, John Nash’s The Bathers, Lucian Freud’s Naked Man With Rat and John Longstaff’s Breaking the news.

AGWA Curators Robert Cook and Rachel Ciesla explain, “Using the language of attachment styles—anxious, avoidant, disorganised and secure—this exhibition offers a way to understand how artworks reflect, dramatise and complicate the ways we relate to each other and with the world around us. Walking through this show, you see not only how we connect, but also how we avoid, idealise and even reinvent the people and places we care about.”

The exhibition also includes works by Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, John Russell and Sydney Long, and more recent and contemporary acquisitions from local artists Tom Freeman, Mary Moore, and a vibrant series of classic rock and pop star portraits by Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Colleen Ahern.

AGWA Director Colin Walker said, “Attachment Styles shows how artists have explored the various ways we relate to each other. By bringing modern and contemporary works together, we invite the community to reflect on the emotional threads that connect us—across time, place, and experience.”

The Art Gallery of Western Australia acquired its first work for the State Art Collection in 1895. Today, the Collection holds more than 18,000 works, renowned for its strength in Western Australian art, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and significant holdings in twentieth-century Australian and British painting and sculpture.