Art exhibitions to see in Sydney this week

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

It's arguable that the beautiful Sarah Bernhardt (the famous French actress) was the world’s first international celebrity, and when Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) painted her, the posters of the painting quickly became ubiquitous in Paris, and were ripped from the streets by collectors as soon as they were pasted up. Now, the work of this art nouveau maestro is on at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) this winter, in a Sydney exclusive, Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau. The most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever seen in Australia runs through to September 22. Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau is the first exhibition of historical art presented in the Art Gallery's recently renamed Naala Badu north building, which opened at the end of 2022 as part of the Sydney Modern project. The exhibition explores his full oeuvre, drawn from the Mucha Family Collection and featuring 200 works from the artist's five-decade career, including paintings, illustrations, posters, jewellery, photographs, sculpture and even an immersive digital experience. Alongside Mucha’s work, the exhibition also features a selection of Japanese prints from the Art Gallery’s ukiyo-e collection, which were popular during Mucha’s time in Paris in the late 19th century, which influenced the art nouveau style. Plus more recent art inspired by the countercultural rediscovery of Mucha’s work. This major winter blockbuster leads AGNSW’s 2024 exhibition program, which brings the human fig

With a distinctive art style that probes at the veil between myth and reality, Western Sydney-based Filipina-Australian artist Marikit Santiago’s paintings are a love letter to her family and her culture. It’s not hard to see why Santiago has been named the winner of the 2024 La Prairie Art Award, and you can see her impressive work for yourself now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Now in its third year, the prestigious La Prairie Art Award is all about championing Australian women artists. A partnership between the Art Gallery of NSW and Swiss luxury skincare house La Prairie, the prestigious award comprises the acquisition of artwork for the Art Gallery collection, as well as an international artist residency in Europe.  Santiago was selected for her two paintings ‘A Seat at the Table (Magulang)’ and ‘A Seat at the Table (Kapatid)’. These tender portraits portray two generations of Santiago’s family – her parents and her sister – with magulang translating to ‘parents’ and kapatid to ‘sibling’ in Tagalog. These award-winning paintings are on display as part of the Making Worlds exhibition on lower level 1 of the Art Gallery’s newer North Building (the star of the Sydney Modern expansion) until late July. (Hot tip: entry is free, and the gallery is open late on Wednesdays.) Encompassing new acquisitions and much-loved collection highlights, the Making Worlds exhibition brings together artists whose work reflects on the complex worlds we create and share, both real and i

Want to see something fresh? Six of the most exciting emerging visual artists in the country are currently exhibiting at Artspace in Woolloomooloo, and it won’t cost you anything to stroll on in and take a look. The long-running NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) exhibition has earned a reputation as a highlight in the NSW visual arts calendar, showcasing the diverse and exciting talent of a new generation of artists, and helping to launch many careers. Each year, Create NSW convenes a judging panel of esteemed colleagues to assess the highly competitive pool of applications, and select the exhibition finalists and the Fellowship recipient. Gillian Kayrooz, an artist hailing from Guildford in Western Sydney, has been announced as the Fellowship recipient for 2024, with the news being announced at the official exhibition launch event on Thursday, June 4. She will use the prestigious $30,000 Fellowship to undertake a self-directed program to develop her professional practice. Gillian’s intimate three-channel film installation titled ‘Leave Your Shoes at the Door’ poignantly interweaves personal narratives, cultural traditions and local landscapes around Darug Country in Sydney’s outer west, where the artist grew up. Accompanied by an immersive stereo soundtrack, the 4-minute and 30-second video was filmed across three locations that have personal significance to Gillian, and interrupts the everyday ritual of leaving your shoes at the front door to share a message of gratitud

There’s something different about the way a child views the world – a sweet naïveté, a rose-tinted lens. It’s the expansive joy of a busy beach on the first day of summer, when the holidays seem to stretch ahead of you for eternity. It’s the sense of transcendent awe that comes over you when you take a moment alone to look out across a river and realise, for the first time, that other people’s lives carry on without you there. If we could bottle those feelings, offer adults the chance to tap back into the intensity of emotions in their freshest form, we’d be millionaires. And while that kind of neurological wizardry is currently impossible, there’s an exhibition popping up in Sydney offering the next best thing. Little Sydney Lives is a photography exhibition featuring the work of some of Sydney’s best young photographers, and if you want a taste of childhood nostalgia, we’d suggest adding this to your hit list.  Part of City of Sydney’s Art and About program, this year’s competition saw more than 284 entries submitted by children aged between 5 and 12 from across the Harbour City, with a total of 21 photographs making the finalists’ exhibition. The collection of photographs capture the essence of childhood – a big sister shrouded in sunlight, a handstand on the football field, a backyard bonfire. Among the shortlisted images, there’s a gloriously colourful picture of sunbathers on the slab at Wylies Baths, a perfectly framed shot of five Swans players approaching the SCG, an

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