Media and Copyright

Pippin Drysdale – A Major Retrospective

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) is proud to present Pippin Drysdale: Infinite Terrain, a landmark retrospective honouring the extraordinary career of internationally renowned ceramicist Pippin Drysdale.

Spanning over forty years of practice, the exhibition features work from the State Art Collection alongside significant loans. It offers a rare opportunity to explore Drysdale’s adventurous spirit, collaborative processes, and her singular ability to interpret the world through porcelain. Her vast fields of flowing lines and mesmerising colour evoke landscapes both intimate and expansive, inviting viewers into layered readings that intertwine memory, place, and imagination.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) is thrilled to welcome one of Australia’s most loved and prized portrait artists, Vincent Fantauzzo as the guest speaker for The West Australian Pulse Talks 2025, with a selection of his past and new works.

Vincent Fantauzzo is a four-time Archibald People’s Choice Award winner and a passionate advocate for young and emerging artists. Fantauzzo is represented in private collections and institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Portrait Gallery and Parliament House in Canberra. And has painted everyone from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard to actor Heath Ledger and his own wife, Asher Keddie.

The Pulse Talks event on Saturday 23 August, offers the public, especially young creatives, a chance to hear firsthand how art transformed one man’s life.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) is thrilled to announce the upcoming exhibition Paola Pivi – I don’t like it, I love it by globally celebrated artist Paola Pivi. This expansive and vibrant exhibition marks one of the artist’s biggest and most ambitious projects in her almost 30-year career. The installation at AGWA features major commissions created especially for AGWA’s unique architectural spaces, as well as other new works and key selected works from across Pivi’s career.

Italian-born Paola Pivi (b.1971) is one of the world’s most recognisable and loved contemporary artists. Her practice playfully blurs the line between reality and fantasy, often incorporating animals and objects in surreal scenarios—multicoloured feathered polar bears in dynamic poses, zebras in arctic landscapes, or airplanes impossibly tipping and spinning in public plazas. Her works are joyful, disarming, and immediately accessible, yet also deeply thoughtful as they explore themes ranging from consumerism, sustainability, displacement, to the human condition.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) is proud to present HALE TENGER / BORDERS / BORDERS, the first museum survey of internationally renowned artist Hale Tenger.

Spanning the artist’s practice from the 1990s to the present, this exhibition features iconic multimedia installations alongside significant works in video, sculpture and sound, foregrounding the ways in which Tenger’s concern with history, politics and human psychology shape narratives of belonging and exclusion.

Re-PLAY – for the young and young at heart

In an era marked by disconnection, digital saturation, and declining mental wellbeing, Re-PLAY arrives as a vibrant call to action, and a joyful return to hands-on, human connection.

Presented by The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), and curated by Head of Learning and Creativity Research, Lilly Blue, this bold and interactive exhibition is the result of a powerful collaboration between the AGWA Learning and celebrated Western Australian artist Maxxi Minaxi May.

FIRST AUSTRALIAN SHOWING – AN AGWA EXCLUSIVE

In another Australian first, The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) presents Moving Landscape, an exhibition by internationally acclaimed US artist Sam Contis.

This stunning exhibition brings together three main bodies of work – Deep Springs, Overpass, and Cross Country – giving us a view of the artist’s practice over twelve years and 85 works.

Sam Contis is one of the most dynamic US photographers working in our contemporary moment, whose work explores the construction of place and self. Shifting between black & white and colour, and large- and intimately-scaled views, she builds a new terrain out of multiple fragments and perspectives, showing us different ways of seeing and experiencing the body and its environment.

Now in its 33rd year, AGWA is proud to present The West Australian Pulse 2025 showcasing the works of Year 12 visual arts graduates.

The West Australian Pulse is an inspiring, rewarding and insightful look at the world through the minds of our most talented young artists.

Almost 300 student works were submitted for this year’s exhibition, making the final selection a challenging choice for the judges. This year’s exhibition delivers an exciting range of artistic approaches with the final selection showcasing the highest calibre of artworks produced across the State. Sixty-one works by 2024 Year 12 Visual Arts graduates were selected from 37 schools across WA.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) will present a captivating new exhibition that explores the evolution of Modernist bronze sculpture, tracing its journey from the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the mid-to-late twentieth century.

Cast in bronze draws on significant bronze works from The State Art Collection and offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of sculptural practice during a period of profound transformation in the art world.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) presents Art of Peace: Art After War, a thought-provoking exhibition featuring nine artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste who have created artworks shaped by living amongst the aftermath of war and conflict.

In the last thirty years, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Timor-Leste each emerged from different versions of social and human destruction, from the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people. Understandably, the peace following war can often be hard work, and life in a post-conflict society is very different in each of these countries.

ART AND SCIENCE INTERSECT

IN A WORLD FIRST AT AGWA

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) will showcase an extraordinary immersive exhibition combining sound and cutting-edge biological innovation to bring to life the musical genius of a deceased composer.

Four years in the making, Revivification delivers a historic first: the in-vitro (external) ‘brain’ of the late composer Alvin Lucier (1931-2021) creating a new work in real time, as a live performance over the duration of the exhibition.