The best art exhibitions in Melbourne this month

To put it lightly, this is huge.  In June 2018, Melbourne will become the (temporary) home of masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, Mark Rothko... the list goes on. \

Part of the Yalingwa visual arts initiative, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's new exhibition features new works by ten leading Aboriginal artists about everyday, contemporary Indigenous life.

These dual exhibitions show the collision of western and Indigenous art and trace how an Australian artistic expression came to be.Colony: Frontier Wars looks at Indigenous art created in response to colonialism over the last two centuries.

This ambitious exhibition, which premiered as part of Sydney Festival 2017, constitutes the first major survey of artworks by the late Myuran Sukumaran – one of the 'Bali Nine' convicted of drug smuggling in 2005.

George Baldessin and Brett Whiteley were both born in 1939, achieved meteoric success in their respective cities of Melbourne and Sydney, and died tragically young. Yet the similarities don’t stop there.

Ronnie van Hout has been creating aliens, robots and lonely figures for more than 30 years, confounding and thrilling art fans in equal measure with his uniquely funny brand of existential absurdism. He's best known for creating sculptures that depict himself as a childlike figure, but has created work across video, photography, installation, sculpture and text.

Architect Jefa Greenaway curates the first national survey of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander design this month at the Koorie Heritage Trust Galleries in Federation Square. 

Storm Riders, an immersive, 360-degree virtual reality film is, in part, a re-envisioning of Shaun Gladwell's earlier video artwork Storm Sequence (2000). That work saw him skateboarding down on Bondi Beach – this time he's placed two young Muslim women from London at its heart.

On the morning of August 21, 1968, the new St Kilda Road premises of the National Gallery of Victoria opened its doors to the public for the first time. The imposing, brutalist construction, a bluestone monolith in the heart of Melbourne’s Southbank, had taken six years – and $14 million – to complete, and was now the largest art gallery in the country.

After two centuries of seclusion – and with just one international port open – Japan threw its doors open in 1854, resulting in an influx of Japanese art and culture to Europe. At first, Japanese aesthetics began showing up in western art, but when artists like Degas and Van Gogh started to understand more about the underlying movements and principles, the infleunces started to become more profound.