Major galleries reveal their 2025 blockbusters – with big surprises in store

The Art Gallery of NSW has traded its usual painterly offerings of 20th century masters for an Australian line-up in 2025, headlined by a sculptor who broke into the global art world with a scaled-down replica of his father’s naked body.

After hosting a string of international summer and winter blockbusters featuring Rene Magritte, Wassily Kandinsky and Louise Bourgeois, the state’s oldest gallery will next year present mostly homegrown and First Nations artists.

Ron Mueck’s En garde (2023)Credit: Marc Domage

Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia will roll out a program of international firsts, new commissions, and a large new outdoor public sculpture on its harbour-front lawn at Circular Quay.

The MCA will also dive into the world of artificial intelligence in the major exhibition Data Dreams: Contemporary Art in the Age of AI. It will also showcase 14 contemporary Australian women painters in The Intelligence of Painting.

London-based Australian sculptor Ron Mueck will lead the AGNSW’s 2025-26 summer blockbuster, billed as the artist’s largest showing ever on home soil.

Mueck is renowned for his hyperrealistic figures, and plays with scale to explore universal themes of birth and death, adolescence and ageing.

Mueck’s Couple under an umbrella (2013).Credit: AGNSW

Working in his early years as a puppetmaker and performer on The Muppet Show and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), Mueck sculpted models for film, television and advertising before his portrait Dead Dad (1996) caused a sensation in London.

That silicone work showed his father’s lifeless body, created from memory and imagination and etched in meticulous detail. While it is not making the trip to Sydney, the artist’s oversized elderly sunbakers Couple under an Umbrella (2013) will travel from Montreal, Canada.

“Ron Mueck is one of Australia’s most successful and internationally renowned contemporary artists, acclaimed for his astonishingly crafted realist figures and profound observation of human experiences and emotions,” AGNSW director Michael Brand says.

The MCA’s ticketed winter blockbuster will present the first solo Australian show by Welsh-born conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans.

Fabien Giraud, preview image for The Feral (2025-3024), © Association 3024.

The sculptor and experimental filmmaker has collaborated with indie bands The Smiths and The Fall and has created works inspired by Yoko Ono. But Wyn Evans is best known for his monumental three-dimensional drawings in neon light. These suspended works comprise clusters of abstract white neon knots that appear to be part calligraphic scroll, part chandelier.

The AGNSW’s winter offering is Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala, showcasing the work of celebrated Indigenous artists from Yirrkala, a small Indigenous community in Arnhem Land.

This group of artists has dominated Australia’s long-running and prestigious Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, and built a strong international reputation and collector base.

“Borrowed Light Through Metz” by Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans.Credit: Lewis Ronald

Other major highlights of 2025 include:

Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission (MCA)

A large sculptural work by Thomas J Price will be installed on the lawn of the MCA in September as part of the new sculpture commission series supported by The Balnaves Foundation. The subject is under wraps, but Price is known for his large-scale works that “reframe the ordinary as extraordinary”.

MCA director Suzanne Cotter says only that the sculpture will be large enough to be visible from the Cahill Expressway. “It’s a work we believe is going to really engage the four-plus million people that walk past the MCA every year,” she says. “It’s going to be a lovely Instagrammable moment, and we see it as something that will speak to many people.”

The Key’s Under the Mat (AGNSW)

Playground designer and artist Mike Hewson is moving into the subterranean Tank space in October to make an “anarchic and generous sculptural neighbourhood” for visitors to meet, play, perform and explore in. Hewson has built “risky” new children’s playgrounds in Melbourne, Sydney and Wollongong. For Southbank’s $2.5 million Rocks on Wheels he wedged large bluestone climbable boulders, monkey bars and a metal slide on platforms with bolted-down wheels. The Tank commission will be constructed from thousands of salvaged objects and materials.

Data Dreams (MCA)

Fifteen artists or collectives have been invited to explore what artificial intelligence means to them in this Sydney International Art Series exhibition. “Most of the work will be interactive in dialogue, with the technologies driving the works,” says Cotter of the November show. “It’s going to be visually and spatially stellar because of the subject. There are bright and dark sides to AI, and we’ll be exploring both.”

Dangerously Modern (AGNSW)

This exhibition of more than 200 works by 50 trailblazing Australian women will reveal their global role and legacy in the story of modernism. Margaret Preston, Nora Heysen and Grace Cossington Smith will be celebrated alongside under-recognised names such as Eleanor Harrison, Justine Kong Sing and Stella Marks. The October exhibition has been developed with the Art Gallery of South Australia.

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