Attachment Styles: Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art

Why do we crave closeness while keeping one foot out the door? Why do we love, withdraw, cling to or sabotage our connections with others?

Attachment Styles brings together works from the 19th to 21st century to explore these questions, showing how artists have long grappled with the emotional complexity of human relationships between individuals, communities and the environments they inhabit.

The display draws on the language of attachment styles: anxious, avoidant, disorganised and secure. These psychological concepts were first developed by John Bowlby in the 1950s and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth to describe the emotional and behavioural patterns that shape our bonds from infancy through to adulthood. In recent years, these ideas have spilled into popular culture, saturating social media with memes, reels and quizzes that map our relational behaviours—ghosting, breadcrumbing, love bombing, negging, to name a few—onto the styles of attaching.

Viewed through this lens, the Gallery becomes a kind of ‘global group therapy session’ as artworks reveal our desires, fears and relational gameplaying. Romantic conventions, domestic dramas, fractured families and spectral intimacies across time, place and experience, appear side by side. In doing so, such works challenge us to consider how the the attachment styles formed in our earliest relationships shape the ways we love, withdraw, idealise, defend and connect throughout the entirety of our lives. Collective attachments, especially the social and political bonds that shaped life in this country, also emerge in this display, reminding us that attachment is never just personal.

Given the complexity of art as a many layered, sometimes elusive process and language, the attachment styles visible in these works are rarely clear-cut and never one-dimensional. Like people, artworks contain contradictions: basic styles blend and morph into conglomerate styles that propose fresh modes of relating with the world and the irritating, baffling and occasionally endearing humans within it

Highlights on display include Frederick McCubbin’s Down on his luck and Moyes Bay, Beaumaris, Hans Heysen’s Droving into the light, Arthur Streeton’s The hillside, John Nash’s The Bathers, Lucian Freud’s Naked Man With Rat and John Longstaff’s Breaking the news.

The exhibition also includes works by Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, John Russell and Sydney Long, and more recent and contemporary acquisitions from local artists Tom Freeman, Mary Moore, and a vibrant series of classic rock and pop star portraits by Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Colleen Ahern.