The best art and exhibitions in Melbourne this month

After being postponed for three years, the ‘painter of happiness’ Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) will finally get his airtime at the NGV. Opening on June 9, the blockbuster Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition will display more than 100 works by Bonnard alongside immersive scenography by award-winning designer India Mahdavi.

Often choosing to work from memory, Bonnard was a beloved 20th-century French painter revered for his iridescent palette that used colour to convey fleeting emotions, moods and moments. A founding member of the post-impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his earlier work was influenced by Paul Gauguin and the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. 

Bonnard’s paintings depict intimate domestic interiors and natural landscapes with a subtle and sensual use of colour and light. Curated by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in partnership with the NGV, this world-premiere exhibition will bring 19th and early 20th-century France to Melbourne with paintings, photographs and decorative objects. Bonnard's works will be presented alongside early cinema by the Lumiere brothers and artworks by early contemporaries of his, including Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton.

Dubbed by The New Yorker as a "virtuoso of colour" and "possessor of perfect chromatic pitch", Paris-based architect and designer India Mahdavi will create the exhibition’s scenography and envelop Bonnard’s works in an environment that will complement the painter's wistful use of colour and texture.

Experience an immersive world in which the designer and the painter collide when you book your tickets to see Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi via the NGV website.

In need of a culture fix? Check out the other best art exhibitions to see in Melbourne this month.

Experience the sights and sounds of Australia’s First Nations artists like never before with Connection, the latest immersive experience at the Lume.

Opening on June 23, get ready to step inside the iridescent world of First Peoples art and culture, displayed on a scale that needs to be seen to be believed. Spanning 3,000 square metres of gallery space, Connection will feature projections four storeys high and an awe-inspiring display of original art.

From intricate dot paintings to watercolours and wood carvings, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have passed down their heritage, traditions and stories through the generations with creativity. At Connection, you can expand your knowledge and appreciation of this rich history through themes of Land, Water, Sky and Country.

Visitors are invited to walk into the works of Australia’s most celebrated First Nations artists, including Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Tommy Watson, Gabriella and Michelle Possum Nungurrayi, Clifford and more. Set to a score of First Nations music, the artwork in Connection will burst to life through a soundtrack that unites legends like Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach and Emily Wurramara, renowned composers like William Barton and emerging musicians like Alice Skye and Baker Boy.

“The technology Connection uses breaks down a lot of barriers to entry,” said Kate Constantine, a featured Gadigal artist of the Eora Nation. “A lot of people like Aboriginal art because it is colourful or pretty, but a lot of people are quite challenged by Aboriginal art too, by not knowing or understanding how to interpret it or not feeling like they have permission to be involved. Connection is just inclusive.” 

Permanently located at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the Lume is open daily to visitors and will be home to Connection from June 23. Tickets are on sale now.

Want to know what else you can tick off the art calendar? Check out the best art and exhibitions happening in Melbourne this month.

Spanning Rembrandt’s four-decade-long career, Rembrandt: True to Life is the most comprehensive exhibition of the Dutch artist’s work held in Australia in more than 25 years.

This NGV exhibition will emphasise the prolific artist’s innovations in printmaking, showcasing more than 100 etchings drawn from the NGV Collection with important loans of paintings from public collections worldwide, like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre Museum in Paris. 

Beginning in Leidein in the 1620s, Rembrandt: True to Life traces the evolution of Rembrandt’s work from the beginning to his final years in Amsterdam in the 1660s. This breadth of work will allow audiences to appreciate the inventive ways in which Rembrandt tackled his work, from his re-imagining of biblical subjects to his profoundly expressive style and the development of psychological complexity in narrative scenes and portraits.

The exhibition will be displayed in thematic groups of portraits, religious motifs, landscapes, nudes, and scenes of everyday life. But at the heart of Rembrandt: True to Life is the artist’s printmaking skills as the first artist to comprehensively explore the medium's possibilities.

A highlight of the exhibition includes Self-Portrait (1659), where Rembrandt depicts himself with unrelenting honesty post-bankruptcy. Another must-see is his best-known and most ambitious etching, The Hundred Guilder Print (1648), as well as the etching Diana at the Bath (1631), where he challenges the conventional representation of a mythological goddess with am uncompromising realism. 

Rembrandt: True to Life will also feature a small recreation of the artist’s Wunderkammer – or cabinet of curiosities – inspired by his collection of prints and drawings, shells and rarities, musical instruments and weapons which he often referred to when seeking creative inspiration. 

Rembrandt: True to Life is on display from June 2 until September 10 at the NGV International. For tickets and information, visit the website here.

Love art? Check out the best art and exhibitions happening in Melbourne this month.

What better time than now for an exhibition that lauds the women in film – the rebels, agitators, instigators and trailblazers – who, despite the odds, shaped their roles, sought control and fought a system that tried to exploit them.

Running until October 1, 2023, this ACMI exhibition celebrates the daring and disruptive women on and off the screen. This landmark exhibition will unveil, examine and celebrate the shifting representation of femininity across film history through provocative cinematic moments.

Traversing 120 years of moving image history, Goddess will feature never-before-seen costumes, original sketches, interactive experiences and cinematic treasures from the icons of the silent era to classic Hollywood heroines and the stars of Bollywood blockbusters. 

Goddess goes behind the scenes to examine the off-screen conversations – and even rebellions – portrayals often ignited, from the sartorial statements of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930), Tilda Swinton in Orlando (1992), Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey (2020) to today's unfolding #MeToo movement and the developing representations of womanhood in Japan, China and India's film history. 

Expect costumes, immersive video works and evocative soundscapes by Melbourne-based composer Chiara Kickdrum with more than 150 original objects, artworks, props and sketches that invite visitors to consider how screen culture has shaped and challenged audiences' views of gender and womanhood. 

From Mae West's sky-high heels in the Belle of the Nineties (1934), costumes worn by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in the classic Thelma & Louise (1991), to Michelle Yeoh's silks from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Goddess will offer a fresh perspective on cinema's most memorable female characters.

The two-time Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis opens the exhibition on April 5 and presents a day-long conference on gender equality and representation in the media. Being Seen on Screen: The Importance of Representation will feature a cross-section of Australian screen industry talent including Australian of the Year Taryn Bruffitt and writer and speaker Carly Findlay OAM.

You can read more about the conference and get tickets to see the Goddess exhibition on the ACMI website.

Want to see why Melbourne holds the crown as the cultural capital of Australia? Check out the other best art exhibitions in Melbourne this month

What better way to hold a mirror up to society than with an exhibition of pictures reflecting our innermost thoughts and feelings? Mirror: New views on photography is a free exhibition at the State Library Victoria featuring 141 images from the photography collection that explores and expands on the meditative theme of ‘mirror’.

The images displayed are sourced from the 1950s until today and are the work of 52 artists, documentarians and photojournalists like Rennie Ellis, Viva Gibb, Helmut Newton and many more. 

The photographs from the collection have acted as a springboard for emerging and established Victorian novelists, essayists and activists – like Alice Skye, Jason Tamiru and Prithvi Varatharajan - who have responded to the images with thought-provoking poems, songs, spoken word and audio visuals. 

Their work has been spun into short films and soundscapes, displayed as large-scale projections on the walls of the Library’s Victoria Gallery, creating an immersive experience of the photography collection alongside artists’ responses.

“Mirror not only offers an insight into Victorian life through the lenses of some brilliant photographers,” said State Library Victoria CEO Paul Duldig, “but it also provides fresh perspectives of the library’s rich holdings of photography through the talents of some brilliant novelists, poets, performers and activists.”

Mirror: New views on photography is on at the State Library Victoria until January 28, 2024. You can discover more about the exhibition on the website here. 

Love a good exhibition? These are the best art and exhibitions in Melbourne this month.

Since the 1990s, the photographer Catherine Opie has used her camera to challenge and illuminate our understanding of the personal and the political. In what will be the first survey of the artist's work in Australia, Catherine Opie: Binding Ties is coming to the Heide.

Running from March 31 to July 9, this exhibition will feature over 50 key works by one of the world's leading photographers. Perhaps best known for her portraits of leather dykes, drag performers and trans members of her queer community in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the nineties, this exhibition extends thinking on identity expression. 

Catherine Opie: Binding Ties will also explore the need to think collectively and work toward common goals of environmental sustainability and social equality. Expect to see Opie’s early and most recognisable works that explore constructions of gender and sexuality through alternative conceptions of the nuclear household. The exhibition will also feature more recent dives into solidarity and collective action in the face of global crises. 

“The selected works demonstrate Catherine Opie’s mastery of photographic technologies and genres to offer us a heterogenous conception of human relations,” says the guest exhibition curator Brooke Babington, “one that moves beyond the traditional limits of identity as defined within and against the wider group, through changing notions of ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘collectivity.’

A consistent motivation across Opie’s three decades of work, these ideas offer us new and challenging ways of thinking through the role of the individual in a rapidly changing world.”

Book tickets to see Catherine Opie: Binding Ties on the Heide website now. 

Want to know what else you can tick off the art calendar? Check out the best art and exhibitions happening in Melbourne this month.

Celebrating the oldest living culture is at the heart of Rising, with fantastic works by exciting First Nations creatives taking over the centrepiece of the city – Flinders Street Station’s sprawling attic rooms.

Towering over the commuters milling below, these vaulted spaces will host eye-popping works by the likes of game-changing Wiradjuri artist and storyteller Karla Dickens, Possum cloak maker and multi-disciplinary artist Vicki Couzens (Keerray Wooroong/Gunditjmara) and even Sweet Country filmmaker and Kaytej man Warwick Thornton, for an extended season from June 7 right through to 30 July.

Curated by Yorta Yorta woman Kimberley Moulton, this will be too brilliant to miss. 

Why is Melbourne crowned the cultural capital of Australia? Check out the best art exhibitions in Melbourne this month.

Lovers of the written word rejoice; a free exhibition over at the State Library Victoria is spotlighting the history of book design, production and illustration from the Middle Ages to the present day. World of the Book features more than 300 rare, remarkable, historically significant items in the State Collection, each unravelling a unique story from its pages. 

This year’s themes hone in on books and ideas; books and imagination; art and nature; artists and books; and Egyptology to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. 

Exhibition highlights include a book on astronomy as far back as 336CE, a 17th-century book defaced by cat paw prints, rare editions of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass on display and an edition of Mary Shelley’s science-friction masterpiece Frankenstein. Printed during the author’s lifetime, it is the first edition to contain a preface where Shelley recounts the story of the novel’s inception: on the shores of Lake Geneva during a thunderstorm where Mary, her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron competed with one another to tell the best ghoulish story. 

World of the Book also includes several masterpieces by female writers on show for the first time, such as an embroidered binding that belonged to Henrietta Maria, the Queen Consort married to King Charles I until he was executed. The physicist Émilie du Châtelet’s most recognised achievement, her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, is also featured in the exhibit. 

Running until May 12, 2024, you’ll find World of the Book at the Dome Galleries, Level 4 of the State Library Victoria. For more information, visit the website here.

Love art? Check out what other art exhibitions are happening in Melbourne this month. Plus, these are the most beautiful libraries in Melbourne.

Step back in time to 1920s Melbourne with this highly anticipated exhibition at Geelong Gallery. Atmosphere showcases more than 60 exceptional paintings spanning 1919 to the early 1930s by a pioneering member of Australia’s tonalist movement, Clarice Beckett.

Beckett was born in Beaumaris and worked in Geelong for part of her career, so this exhibition is a homecoming for her oeuvre and features key works gathered from major Australian public galleries and rarely seen private collections. Beckett’s mesmerising brush strokes will sweep visitors through the streets and seasons of Melbourne, journeying from the city’s local foreshores and cityscapes to Anglesea’s sandy beaches and atmospheric vistas overlooking Port Phillip Bay. 

Atmosphere is more than just an art exhibition. Visitors can embark on a sensory exploration of the colours, sentiments and places inspired by Beckett’s art in the Gallery’s immersive Atmospheric Lab. In addition, Geelong Gallery is hosting a series of events including free drop-in tours every weekend, a slow-looking art tour on Slow Art Day (April 15), a day trip across the bay with exclusive tours and lunch at Rickett’s Point Café (April 4), a special twilight interlude of fine contemplative music by the Vox Angelica Geelong Chamber Choir (May 7), and after-hours access to the gallery with a pop-up bar during the winter solstice (June 22-23).

With ticket prices at $20 for adults and $9 for children, this is a must-see exhibition for art enthusiasts and city explorers alike. Atmosphere runs from April 1 to July 9, 2023. Find out more here.

Whack on something dazzling and dust off your dancing shoes as the much-loved NGV Friday Nights returns this winter. The popular event returns for 19 weeks after another sell-out season for the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition.

Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi will present more than 100 works by the leading French painter Pierre Bonnard with enrapturing scenography by the international designer India Mahdavi. A ticket to NGV Friday Nights includes late-night access to the major world-premiere exhibition, where you can see 19th and 20th-century France brought to life through colour, scape and sound. 

The season will kick off with a headline performance by the ARIA award winner Adrian Eagle in the Great Hall. For the rest of the season, expect a live music line-up that traverses disco, jazz, soul and R&B with DJ sets from Chris Gill and Priya to performances by Tiana Khasi, Glass Beams, Rara Zulu and four-piece Jade Imagine. Discover the full line-up here.

Taking inspiration from regional French fare, the Yering Station Wine Bar in the Great Hall and Pommery Champagne Bar in the Gallery kitchen will serve a comforting menu for the colder nights, including cheese boards, gruyere croquettes, cassoulet and profiteroles.

NGV Friday Nights will run from June 9 until October 6 at NGV International. For further information and to book tickets visit the NGV website here.

The inaugural Melbourne Now launched in 2013 and was an unprecedented display of some of the most exciting local contemporary artists. Now, a decade later, it returns to once again highlight Victorian-based artists, designers, studios and firms whose practices are shaping the cultural landscape of our city.

Opening on March 23 at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, the exhibition will feature highly ambitious and thought-provoking works, including 70 world-premiere pieces that have been specially commissioned by the NGV. The works will traverse various disciplines across fashion, jewellery, sculpture, ceramics, photography, printmaking, product design and painting.

Highlights include a room-sized ‘temple’ constructed using thousands of computer fans by emerging artist Rel Pham, which draws on his Vietnamese heritage and interest in gaming culture, and Walkers with Dinosaurs by Lou Hubbard, a mass of inflatable walking frames that can be found tumbling out of the third-floor foyer of the gallery. Troy Emery will present his largest sculptural work to date: a textile-based feline figure covered in brightly coloured pom poms that stands more than three metres high. 

Also featuring on the stacked artist line-up are the likes of Christian Thompson AO, Esther Stewart, Atong Atem, Mia Boe, Fiona Abicare and Lisa Reid.

The insanely popular Design Wall will return with an installation that celebrates consumer products designed in Melbourne over the past decade (think guitars, pillows, luggage and motorbikes), while Fashion Now spotlights the work of 18 local designers and explores how fashion is embedded in a city’s identity.

“The 2023 exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of the inaugural presentation and offers an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on how Melbourne and Victoria have transformed, changed and grown over the past decade,” said Tony Ellwood AM, director of the NGV.

“No other exhibition series reflects Victorian life and culture with such depth, nuance and breadth. We are excited to build upon this incredible legacy with this new, blockbuster presentation of Victorian creativity in 2023.”

For more information on the exhibition, head to the NGV website.

Love your art? These are the best exhibitions happening in Melbourne this month.

German video artist Julian Rosefeldt worked side by side with Australia’s screen queen Cate Blanchett on film piece Manifesto, which transformed the Tár maestro into myriad fascinating characters when it took over the Art Gallery of NSW back in 2016-17.

They’re at it again with this even more ambitious work that casts Blanchett as a supermarket-stalking tiger in a surround-sound work beamed onto screens all over Melbourne Town Hall from June 2-18.

An anti-capitalist masterpiece set to a dazzling jazz band and sweet musings from a melodic choir, it also features the remarkable talents of rap hero Snoop Dogg and Breaking Bad/The Mandalorian star Giancarlo Esposito. 

Want to see why Melbourne is the cultural capital of Australia? Check out the other best art exhibitions in Melbourne this month.

Victorians and New South Welshmen don’t have too much in common (we wear a lot of black, they for some reason insist on calling parmas "a parmi") but there is some common ground – namely the beautiful Murray River which separates our two states. This year, the Murray border community of Echuca Moama is throwing a fun night festival around this legendary river. 

Moama Lights is an immersive sound and light event that runs this year from June 30 to July 23. It will take place at the Horseshoe Lagoon, a 600-metre-long lit-up trail of installations and projections that visitors can traverse and explore. A light show will be projected across the lagoon amongst hundreds of flickering stars lights, and you’ll be able to see a field of illuminated flowers and colours shining across the Murray River. 

In addition to this artistic display of cutting-edge light technology, there will also be an ice skating rink, kids entertainment and food trucks.

Entry to Moama Lights is $20 for adults and $10 for children – you can book at the website.

Keen to see some more winter lights? Check out our list of everything lit up, glowing and illuminated in Melbourne this month, or our list of winter light festivals in regional Victoria.

With her extraordinary body of work and her unique ability to portray complex female characters, the New Zealand-born filmmaker and screenwriter Jane Campion has garnered decades of critical acclaim and an indisputable place in cinema history. Now is your chance to immerse yourself in the work of this pioneering filmmaker with this touring retrospective. 

Jane Campion – Her Way will encompass screenings of all nine of Campion's feature films, as well as a selection of her short films, and the Australian premiere of a new documentary about her life and career; screening as part of the 70th Sydney Film Festival (SFF) in Sydney first before making its way to ACMI in Melbourne from June 15 until July 2. 

In addition to five selected shorts, the feature films screening as part of the program include Two Friends (1986) (Sydney and Canberra only), Sweetie (1989), An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke (1999), In the Cut (2003), Bright Star (2009) and The Power of the Dog (2021) (Sydney and Melbourne only). 

“Campion has broken barriers for women in the industry, winning two Academy Awards and becoming the first woman to receive the Palme d'Or at Cannes,” said SFF director Nashen Moodley. 

“She has changed the landscape of cinema around the world, crafting films now etched in film history. It will be remarkable to see the full suite of her talents in one program, which take us to unexpected and exciting places with every frame and film.”

Love film? Celebrate women in film with a trip to ACMI's exhibition Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion.

In an Australian first, the Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours exhibition will take up residence at the Art Gallery of Ballarat from May 20, offering a rare opportunity for visitors to see these awe-inspiring works on paper. 

Running until August 6, Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours will offer an intimate and rare peep into the world of the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their works, including portraits they made of each other, studies for paintings and commissions, and subjects taken from history, literature and landscape. 

Founded in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood reverted to the simplicity and directness of Medieval and Renaissance art, revolting against the triviality of genre painting at the time. While their principal themes were initially religious, the Brotherhood also used subjects from literature and poetry, especially love and death. 

Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours draws from the collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to chart the story of the artists’ lives and loves featuring works by John Ruskin, William and Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal. 

The exhibition In the Company of Morris will also open on the same day, showcasing an exhibition of historical and contemporary Australian artworks that demonstrate the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and, in particular, the 19th-century visionary thinker, designer, writer and artist William Morris. In the Company of Morris will feature work by artists like Louis Abrahams, Janet Beckhouse, Emma Davies, Robert Dowling, Lionel Lindsay, William Strutt, Paul Yore and many more.  

Pre-Raphaelites: Drawing and Watercolours will run at the Art Gallery of Ballarat between May 20 and August 6. Find out more on the website here.

Want to itch that cultural scratch? Check out the best art exhibitions happening in Melbourne today.

Step back in time to 1920s Melbourne with this highly anticipated exhibition at Geelong Gallery. Atmosphere showcases more than 60 exceptional paintings spanning 1919 to the early 1930s by a pioneering member of Australia’s tonalist movement, Clarice Beckett.

Beckett was born in Beaumaris and worked in Geelong for part of her career, so this exhibition is a homecoming for her oeuvre and features key works gathered from major Australian public galleries and rarely seen private collections. Beckett’s mesmerising brush strokes will sweep visitors through the streets and seasons of Melbourne, journeying from the city’s local foreshores and cityscapes to Anglesea’s sandy beaches and atmospheric vistas overlooking Port Phillip Bay. 

Atmosphere is more than just an art exhibition. Visitors can embark on a sensory exploration of the colours, sentiments and places inspired by Beckett’s art in the Gallery’s immersive Atmospheric Lab. In addition, Geelong Gallery is hosting a series of events including free drop-in tours every weekend, a slow-looking art tour on Slow Art Day (April 15), a day trip across the bay with exclusive tours and lunch at Rickett’s Point Café (April 4), a special twilight interlude of fine contemplative music by the Vox Angelica Geelong Chamber Choir (May 7), and after-hours access to the gallery with a pop-up bar during the winter solstice (June 22-23).

With ticket prices at $20 for adults and $9 for children, this is a must-see exhibition for art enthusiasts and city explorers alike. Atmosphere runs from April 1 to July 9, 2023. Find out more here.

Supported by the City of Melbourne, Flash Forward is Melbourne’s most ambitious street art project, with over 40 large-scale works commissioned and set to hit the laneways of Melbourne.

From Mountjoy’s ‘Your Turn’ on Little Lonsdale Street standing over six metres tall with vibrant pops of colour, through to LING’s gargantuan sculptural piece ‘Crushed Can’ on Wills Street paying homage to the city’s graffiti scene, Flash Forward is encouraging exploration with an element of surprise, as pieces seem to pop up across the city overnight.

If you’re interested in taking yourself on a laneway tour, there’s an interactive and printable map available on the Flash Forward website.