This summer, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) will be transformed by the iconic and hyper-colourful work of globally renowned contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama. The world premiere exhibition, Yayoi Kusama, is one of the most comprehensive retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s work ever presented globally and the largest ever mounted in Australia.
The exhibition is the centrepiece of the NGV’s Spring Summer season 2024, which also features the first retrospective exhibition of Australian First Nations artist Reko Rennie, the global unveiling of a newly commissioned work by Netherlands-based designer and innovator Christien Meindertsma, and an irreverent exhibition exploring how cats and dogs have inspired great works of art and design.
Opening in December at NGV International, the world-premiere blockbuster exhibition Yayoi Kusama spans the artist’s entire eight-decade career. Curated by the NGV, the exhibition features more than 180 works, including many never-before-seen by local audiences such as the global unveiling of Kusama’s latest immersive infinity mirror room. The NGV’s dedicated free children’s gallery will also present Kusama for Kids: The obliteration room, a participatory Kusama artwork that invites visitors to apply stickers to transform the space with Kusama’s signature colourful dots.
From cattle dogs to lap dogs, divine felines to the black cats of superstition, Cats & Dogs, a new exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia opening November 2024, explores humanity’s deep connection to cats and dogs through more than 250 works. Drawn from the NGV Collection, this exhibition crosses cultures and time, revealing how our domesticated companions have long been a rich source of visual imagery. The exhibition features works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco de Goya, Albrecht Dürer, Pierre Bonnard, Eileen Mayo, David Hockney, Hulda Guzmán and more alongside celebrated Australian artists, including Trevor Turbo Brown, Atong Atem, Claudia Moodoonuthi, Charles Blackman, Grace Cossington Smith and Nora Heysen.
Featuring neon light sculptures, cinematic moving images, powerful text-based works and more, Rekospective: The Art of Reko Rennie is the artist’s largest exhibition to date and features more than 100 works. Open from 11 October at NGV Australia, the exhibition reveals Rennie’s globally celebrated and distinctive visual style, which combines the iconography of his Kamilaroi heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti and contemporary media. By merging traditional Kamilaroi diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning with contemporary mediums, such as print making, sculpture, video, painting and neon, the artist seeks to subvert romantic ideologies of Aboriginal identity.
Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 invites eight leading Australian landscape architecture and design firms to reimagine the lands and waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River) and create an exciting vision for how communities can better access, engage with and care for this important living ecosystem. Opening in August at NGV Australia, the exhibition features thought-provoking and visually-arresting renders, illustrations, 3D models, interactive maps, multimedia and more by ASPECT Studios, Bush Projects, McGregor Coxall, Office, Openwork, Realm Studios, SBLA and TCL.
Also at NGV Australia from October, Bark Salon is a new display presenting First Nations bark painting in a mass display referencing the style of traditional European salons from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Housed within the Wurrdha Marra galleries dedicated to First Nations art and design, Bark Salon offers a uniquely Australian counterpoint to this European tradition and highlights the extraordinary creativity and diversity of bark painting from the NGV Collection.
Christien Meindertsma is the third recipient of the MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission, a major series inviting globally renowned female designers to create groundbreaking new work for the NGV Collection. This October at NGV International, Meindertsma unveils her newly commissioned large-scale design work exploring wastage in the European wool industry. Meindertsma employs super-material made from discarded wool, created using cutting-edge 3D felting technology developed in partnership with Netherlands-based company Tools for Technology.
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