The best art exhibitions in Sydney this month

The Art Gallery of NSW's Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age attracted 130,000 people last summer, showcasing works from the 17th century held by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. For this summer, the AGNSW is travelling east and skipping forward a few centuries with 65 paintings from St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum.

For this year's big summer exhibition, the MCA is changing directions drastically and presenting an exhibition of mostly black-and-white photos by South African photographer David Goldblatt.

American artist Nick Cave – not to be confused with the Australian singer-songwriter – is bringing 16,000 wind spinners, 24 chandeliers, 10 miles of crystals, thousands of ceramic birds and one crocodile to Sydney. Cave’s Until is a mammoth new installation work coming to Carriageworks.

If you've ever been to the Eveleigh Railway Workshop, you'll know it's a pretty special place, brimming over with history and full of massive, abandoned manufacturing machinery. It's been out of use since 1988, but this event is bringing new life to the 130-year-old blacksmith forge.

The foyer installation at White Rabbit always sets the tone for each exhibition, but the one that greets visitors to Supernatural is a pretty big statement. Hanging high above the gallery are ten life-like nude figures. They have the body of a man, but from the chest up they’re dragonflies, complete with four wings and bulbous eyes.

This virtual-reality film has just wowed audiences at the Venice International Film Festival, and now Carriageworks has scored a coup in screening it in Australia. The creation of artist and director Lynette Wallworth and producer Nicole Newnham, who picked up an Emmy for their last VR film, Collisions, Awavena was made at the invitation of Brazilian Amazonian Yawanawa people and tells the story of Hushahu, the tribe’s first female shaman.

Emily McDaniel, from from the Kalari Clan of the Wiradjuri nation, is one of the busiest young curators working in Sydney at the moment. For this exhibition at UTS Gallery, she's pulling together works from a diverse range of Aboriginal contemporary artists across drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, video and photography, all looking into “the void”.

Halloween comes early to the Cement Fondu gallery in Paddington with this artsy take on our obsession with horror and the post-apocalyptic world. 

Renowned for his arresting stop-motion video installations, William Kentridge is the best-known contemporary artist working in South Africa today. In this exhibition, curated by the artist himself, visitors can trace the development of his career, from his interest in opera and early cinema to his preoccupation with the nexus between art, ideology, history and memory as a witness to South Africa’s apartheid era.

Did you know the lower North Shore had its own mini creative movement in the '70s and early '80s?