Past exhibitions 2012

Explores the idea of home through the works of Aboriginal artists who belong to nations and language groups that today fall within the area defined as New South Wales.

This exhibition of the Australian Bookbinders focuses on contemporary practice in the art form known as design binding. On display are 32 books with unique bindings created by 20 artists.

A small section of works from this year’s scholarship winner Mitch Cairns and highly commended finalist Tom Polo.

Lose yourself in the beauty of Old Paris with over 200 rare and original prints from the founder of documentary photography.

An annual exhibition of children’s art from schools throughout NSW created for the Children’s Hospital, Westmead.

This mesmerising new work includes one video showing dancers performing a mixture of urban styles, while another features the vocal percussions of a beatboxer.

International artists come together to collaborate and create works that relate as if evolving from each other.

This exhibition of works by Jacky Redgate from the Gallery’s collection surveys the artist’s creative trajectory from the 1980s until now.

Explores the work of one of Japan’s leading artists and designers of the first half of the 20th century, his influences and his legacy, through paintings, lacquerware, ceramics and textiles.

Focuses on the representation and perception of deformity in our society, with specific reference to the tragedy surrounding the pharmaceutical drug thalidomide.

The first major exhibition to explore the influence of the Symbolist movement on Australian art at the turn of the 19th century.

Brett Whiteley not only embraced traditional modes of beauty but also notoriously challenged them. Blue explores Whiteley’s fascination with nature in its extreme contradictions of light and dark, calm and disruption.

Australia’s most extraordinary art event, the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes is an annual exhibition eagerly anticipated by artists and audiences alike.

The focus of this display is a 15-metre long video projection, featuring an emotive and politically charged sequence of images addressing gender violence in India.

Photographs by artists based in Southern California, whose work deals with relations between landscape and architecture, high and low culture, representations of the body, politics and irony, word and image.

In this video installation, Raskopoulos performs a series of actions that accumulate letters into words, in English and Greek, using her own limbs as the writing instrument or surface.

Celebrating 2012 as the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, this exhibition showcases artworks that carry the dragon motif.

The Art Gallery of NSW now holds Australia’s most comprehensive representation of contemporary art. This is the first display in our new contemporary galleries, featuring the John Kaldor Family Gallery.

A dynamic and popular exhibition featuring a selection of outstanding student artworks developed for the artmaking component of the HSC examination in Visual Arts, 2011.

This exhibition is the most significant Picasso exhibition to come to Australia. Part of a world tour, the Art Gallery of NSW is the only Australian venue.

Key themes and artists in Australian art from the early 20th century through to the 1970s, including Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd.

The most respected award for drawing in Australia, the annual Dobell Prize has always been the subject of discussion and debate about the nature of drawing.

Blending fact and fiction, this mesmerising video installation uses appropriated sound and footage to fabricate an impossible exchange between the late sci-fi author Philip K Dick and his one-time muse and wife Tessa.

An exhibition of more than 45 photographs from the collection, which focuses on some of the crucial points in the history of photographic depictions of the human face.

Showcases some of the artworks that have been added to the Gallery’s world-class Asian collection in the last five years.