A huge painting across gold panels
Photograph: Supplied
Photograph: Supplied

Art exhibitions to see in Sydney today

You are spoilt for choice when it comes to art in Sydney during winter.

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From Sydney's best galleries to its artist-run initiatives, from car park shows to outdoor art, here are the best exhibitions and art events in Sydney today. 

  • Art
  • Sculpture and installations
  • Bondi Beach
Mark up your calendars and start dreaming of warm, sunny days – one of Sydney’s most beloved events, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, is back on our city’s coastline from this week. The Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk (the spectacular two-kilometre stretch between two of Sydney's best beaches) will be transformed once again, with more than 100 eye-catching art installations by Australian and international sculptors. The 2024 edition of Sculpture by the Sea will run from Friday, October 18 to November 4, and as ever, it will be totally free to visit. The exhibition always beckons the start of the Sydney summer, with some 450,000 visitors expected to pop down for a stroll over the course of 18 days. "Sculptures" always showcases an eclectic mix of art styles, from the comedy and commentary of a life-sized ice cream truck melting into a puddle on the sand, to a nonchalant oversized lobster reclining on a folding chair, to more abstract-looking structures that defy the laws of physics. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Time Out Sydney (@timeoutsydney) Last year, the popular cultural event celebrated its momentous 25th anniversary (and we were on the scene to suss out the sculptural highlights). That’s not a bad run (so far) for something that had humble beginnings as a one-day exhibition that was run by volunteers and featured works by 64 artists, attracting a cool 25,000 visitors. Since then, the event has grown to become the largest annual free-to-the-p
  • Art
  • Galleries
  • Sydney
Jaws were on the floor earlier this year when the Art Gallery of New South Wales announced that it had secured Australia’s biggest and first-ever retrospective exhibition dedicated to the one and only René Magritte. Opening at the end of October, and sticking around until February 2025, consider Sydney art fiends' summer plans settled.  The exhibition titled ‘Magritte’ is part of Sydney’s International Art Series spanning 2024 and 2025. Getting in on the action are the state gallery’s Cao Fei: My City is Yours, and the MCA's Julie Mehretu exhibitions.  You could consider Magritte the master of symbols, and you’ve likely seen his plastered all over the place: clouds, bowler hats, pipes… well, *not* pipes, to be precise. The exhibition takes art lovers and history fanatics through 20 years worth of Magritte’s paintings, starting from the 1920s in the height of the surrealist movement. More than 100 works make up the showing, and they’ve been flown in from all over the world including from the MoMA in New York, the Musée Magritte in Brussels, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, plus other museums and even some private collections too.  Magritte opens at the Art Gallery of NSW in the South Building’s Lower Level 2 on October 26 and will be there until February 9, 2025. The exhibition is a ticketed event, and prices start from, $30 for members and $35 for adults, or you can save some pennies by purchasing two for one tickets on Wednesday nights or this ultra pass to all three
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  • Art
  • Galleries
  • Darling Harbour
If you can’t quite hack the requisite international airfare and/or annual leave to explore the Amazon, meet polar bears, or go deep sea diving right now, there is another method for getting up close and personal with some of the world’s most incredible animals.  For the 59th year in a row, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition will arrive in Sydney on loan from London’s Natural History Museum. Taking root at the National Maritime Museum, this stunning collection of photographs will be on show in Sydney from Saturday, June 15 until November 2024.  This incredibly prestigious photography event is centred on drawing attention to the wild beauty and fragility of the natural world. This year, judges had to look at nearly 50,000 entries from a line-up of professional and amateur photographers across 95 countries, being faced with the near-impossible task of whittling these down to just over 100 photo finalists. The images that made this year’s exhibition shine a light on the strain that our natural environment is under as a result of human intervention, and capture mesmerising snapshots of fascinating animal behaviour, stunning secret moments in the hearts of the world’s most unreachable places.The prestigious Grand Title this year went to French photographer Laurent Ballesta, whose surreal image of a golden horseshoe crab has earned him the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year for the second time. So, if you are in the mood to escape reality, dive into strange an
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  • Art
  • Galleries
  • The Rocks
In its 33rd year, the MCA’s Primavera is back in Circular Quay to showcase the brilliance of young artists under 35. This year’s exhibition, curated by Lucy Latella, revolves around the generational struggle Australians face to maintain their diverse cultures.  Two of the selected artists hail from Victoria, one from each of NSW, the ACT and SA, but their backgrounds, and the cultural stories they have to share, extend well beyond (colonial) Australian borderlines. Here’s a rundown of the art on offer... Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is a Hong Kongese-Australian artist from. Her background in music bleeds into her art, where she explores the mistranslation of women’s folk songs from the Weitou people.  Walgalu and Wiradjuri man Aiden Hartshorn hails from Wagga Wagga and Canberra. He works with modern materials like aluminium to reference the man-made industries that play havoc with his peoples’ ancestral connections to the river systems.  Teresa Busuttil splits her time between Adelaide and Malta, where she salvages materials like seashells to pay homage to her father’s migration from Malta to Australia. Her other works traverse the experience of young people under various colonial and contemporary powers in Malta. Sarah Ujmaia draws on her family’s experience of migrating to Melbourne from northern Iraq. Her interactive piece And thank you to my baba for laying the timber floor is an array of pavers that represent both the marketplace back home, and the evolution of oral languages. 
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  • Art
  • Galleries
  • Chippendale
Once upon a time in ancient China, there was an alchemist and philosopher who desperately sought to live forever – and he toiled away in his lab with ingredients like mercury, lead, and gold in his pursuits. Sorry to spoil the ending for you, but he never did find a cure for mortality – however, he did happen to create gunpowder and start a religion along the way. While nowadays this man, Laozi, is better known as a legendary philosopher and the father of Taoism, Chippendale’s White Rabbit Gallery is shining a spotlight on his lesser-known past.  A medieval forerunner to chemistry, the idea of alchemy is rooted in the transmutation of metals and other matter into gold, as well as the pursuit of a universal elixir. Just like Laozi, the artists behind this exhibition are exploring the material realm and pushing the boundaries of what things, as we know them, can be. We’re particularly enamored by Lu Pingyuan’s ‘Shadow of the Shadow, 2021’, a collection of adorable soot-black sculpted creatures with cartoonish eyes that peer curiously back at onlookers (they’re reminiscent of the soot sprites from Spirited Away). In essence, Laozi’s Furnace explores further possibilities of the term “mind into matter, and matter back into mind”.  For the uninitiated, the beloved White Rabbit is a privately-owned, state-of-the-art temple to contemporary Chinese art in the heart of Sydney’s coolest suburb (as certified by Time Out’s global ranking!). We always have high expectations for the bi-ann
  • Art
  • Sculpture and installations
  • The Rocks
If you’ve ever heard the words “feminist” and “Australian contemporary artist” in the same sentence, then you’ve probably also heard the name Julie Rrap. With a career spanning more than 40 years, she’s a major figure in the art world who is known for stripping down and incorporating her own body into her multidisciplinary art practice – in which she examines representations of the female nude in art and popular culture over time. You have the chance to have an intimate encounter with Rrap’s work at the the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) with Past Continuous, a new exhibition featuring both new and past work.  “When I looked in art history books, particularly, there were lots of pictures of women – nude women mostly – and not a lot of women artists,” said Rrap, when speaking with Time Out Sydney’s Alannah Le Cross.  “At the same time I was reading people like Simone de Beauvoir, and I was just beginning that little journey of my own about what it is to be a woman in the world,” she said, also adding that at the time she was studying literature and was quite active in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. “So I guess this show, for me, represents that back history for me… there was always this way in which the female body was always the subject, but they were never themselves a subject.” Rrap’s landmark 1982 installation work – ‘Disclosures: A Photographic Construct’ – has been drawn from the MCA Collection for the exhibition, and this is where your journey begins. The firs

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