Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists @ MCA Australia, Sydney - Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists

MCA Australia, Sydney

5 September 2025 - 8 March 2026 

EMMALINE ZANELLI

Magic Cave, 2024 

6.5 x 4 x 2.4 m, bird, mouse, rat, cat, dog and 

hermit crab cages, plastic tunnels, toys, LED lights

Installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney

© and courtesy of the artist

Primavera is the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia's annual exhibition of young Australian artists aged 35 and under. Now in its 34th year, Primavera continues to be a significant platform for early-career Australian artists and curators to present exciting new work. Since its inception, the exhibition series has presented the work of more than 250 artists and 30 curators and propelled the careers of many of Australia’s most significant artists. Primavera was initiated in 1992 by Dr Edward Jackson AM, Mrs Cynthia Jackson AM and their family in memory of their daughter and sister Belinda, a talented jeweller who died at the age of 29.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) announces the five artists to exhibit in Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists, Francis Carmody (VIC/NSW), Alexandra Peters (VIC), Augusta Vinall Richardson (VIC), Keemon Williams (QLD) and Emmaline Zanelli (SA).

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists is curated by MCA Australia Curator, Tim Riley Walsh. The artist selection is driven by the theme of society’s relationship to industry and the machine in the contemporary era. The work of the five artists address es technology and mechanical intertwinement in various ways.

About Primavera 2025, Riley Walsh said: 'The selected artists for Primavera 2025 reflect the innovation and sheer talent of the emerging contemporary Australian art world. Over the course of close to 50 studio visits I conducted across the country I saw intriguing shifts in how young practitioners are engaging with a rapidly changing sociopolitical and technological landscape. How this translates into creative practice is the focus of this presentation.'

'My ongoing interest as a curator is art’s power to make us look anew at subjects that typically evade representation or understanding. What is out of view or exceeds our senses. These five artists help broaden our world view and begin to unravel the complexity of the current era.'

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists - About the artists

FRANCIS CARMODY

Photo: Tim Herbertson

Francis Carmody 

Born 1998, Gadigal Country/Sydney. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne 

Francis Carmody thinks of his practice as a form of speculative storytelling. He considers the social structures that underpin our current reality to understand our past and to imagine possible futures. Carmody’s work spans mediums and engages collaborators with expertise across diverse disciplines to investigate historical and natural phenomena. Francis Carmody received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Between 2022–2024 he was a Gertrude Studio Artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm/Melbourne. Recently he has exhibited work at Gertrude Glasshouse, Conners Conners, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Mejia, all located in Naarm/Melbourne.  

FRANCIS CARMODY

Black Swan Event: Incubating (detail), 2024 

Plaster, horsehair, polymer paint, nylon, 

60 x 60 x 30 cm

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christian Capurro

FRANCIS CARMODY

A Relic Remains, 2023 

Installation view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Collingwood 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christian Capurro

Alexandra Peters 

Born 1990, Warrnambool. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne 

Alexandra Peters is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work spans painting, print, sculpture and assemblage, often taking the form of an installation. These arrangements explore the field of expanded painting through the interrogation of support structures and framing devices. Peters completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University, Melbourne in 2022, where she was the recipient of the Monash University Museum of Art Award and the Megalo Print Award. Her works have been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally and include recent commissioned presentations at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. She has also been featured in exhibitions by 1301SW, Melbourne; Asbestos, Melbourne; NAP Contemporary, Mildura; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; and Propaganda Network, Tbilisi, Georgia. She is currently part of the studio program at Gertrude Contemporary.

ALEXANDRA PETERS 

Breakneck: Blowback (Source), 2024

Acrylic and water-based ink with screen-print 

medium and paste on leatherette, 250 x 180 cm

(2-panels, each 250 x 90 cm) 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrew Curtis

ALEXANDRA PETERS

Installation view, Future Remains: 

The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions, 

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 

Naarm/Melbourne, 2024 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrew Curtis

ALEXANDRA PETERS

Breakneck: Fenestration (Auto-Extrication), 2024

Acrylic and water-based ink with screen-print 

medium and paste on leatherette,

250 x 480 cm (4-panels, each 250 x 120 cm) 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrew Curtis

AUGUSTA VINALL RICHARDSON

© the artist. Courtesy The Commercial, Sydney

Photo: Lucy Foster

Augusta Vinall Richardson 

Born 1991, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne 

Augusta Vinall Richardson makes abstract composite sculptures out of sheet and cast metals, employing industrial materials and processes in a practice underpinned by an ethics of responsibility for objects. Her works recall legacies of minimalism but celebrate irregularities and imperfections, investing especially in textural qualities. Her process begins with hand drawings or the building of cardboard and papier-mâché maquettes. In 2022 Vinall Richardson was awarded a Master of Fine Art by Monash University, Naarm/Melbourne. She has exhibited at La Trobe Art Institute, Djaara/Bendigo, and in the 2024 Melbourne Sculpture Biennial. In 2026, she will present a solo exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. She is represented by The Commercial, Sydney.

AUGUSTA VINALL RICHARDSON

Box Sculpture (side by side), 2025

Stainless steel, 150kg approx., 226 x 99 x 23 cm

© the artist. Courtesy The Commercial, Sydney. 

Photo: Andrew Curtis

AUGUSTA VINALL RICHARDSON

Day by day, 2025 

Bronze, patina, 120kg approx., 93 x 215 x 18 cm 

Private collection, Melbourne

© the artist. Courtesy The Commercial, Sydney

Photo: Andrew Curtis

KEEMON WILLIAMS

Photo: Sam Harrison

Keemon Williams 

Kuku Yalanji, Koa, Meriam, and South Sea Islander peoples. Born 1999, Gimuy/Cairns. Lives and works Magandjin/Brisbane 

Keemon Williams is a Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam Mir and South Sea Islander artist and curator based in Magandjin/Brisbane. His practice considers queer, Indigenous and Australian experiences as lived in the shadow of colonisation. His work often draws on the language of production, as well as memory and humour. Williams has presented solo exhibitions at Kuiper Projects, Brisbane, Milani Carpark Gallery, Brisbane and Northsite Contemporary Arts, Cairns. His work has been featured at the National Gallery of Victoria; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; UQ Art Museum, Brisbane; QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane; and Museum of Brisbane. Williams is currently Assistant Curator, Indigenous Australian Art at QAGOMA, Brisbane. He was previously the Exhibitions Officer at Outer Space in Brisbane from 2022–2025. He graduated from Queensland University of Technology with a BFA (Visual Art) in 2019. 

KEEMON WILLIAMS

Installation view, Boomerangs, 2023

Wurrdha Marra, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 2023 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Tom Ross

KEEMON WILLIAMS

Business is Boomin’, 2021

Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, epoxy, 55 x 45 mm 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Kyle Weise

KEEMON WILLIAMS

Business is Boomin’, 2021

Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, epoxy, 55 x 45 mm 

© and courtesy of the artist. Photo: Kyle Weise

EMMALINE ZANELLI

Photo: Thomas McCammon

Emmaline Zanelli 

Born 1994, Tarndanya/Adelaide. Lives and works Tarndanya/Adelaide

Emmaline Zanelli’s work combines elements of video, photography, sculpture and performance. Influenced by absurdism and surrealism, she creates art that seeks humour and meaning in the everyday. Recently, her work has considered themes of labour and youth culture. Emmaline Zanelli completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Adelaide College of the Arts in Tarndanya/Adelaide in 2015, and a MA in Photography at the Photography Studies College in Naarm/Melbourne in 2021. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across Australia, including Stills Gallery, Sydney, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Naarm/Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Tarndanya/Adelaide. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography and Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, and screened at the Arles Photography Festival in France. In 2022 her video work Dynamic Drills (2019–2021) was selected as the winner of The Churchie Emerging Art Prize. 

EMMALINE ZANELLI

Magic Cave, 2024 

6.5 x 4 x 3.8 m, bird, mouse, rat, cat, dog and 

hermit crab cages, plastic tunnels, toys, LED lights

Installation view, Studios: 2024, 

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental 

© and courtesy of the artist

EMMALINE ZANELLI

I take care of what’s mine (still), 2023–2024

Two channel video, sound, 25:47 minutes, 

Commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival X UniSA 

Samstag Museum of Art EXPAND Lab, 

Supported by Creative Australia 

© and courtesy of the artist

EMMALINE ZANELLI

I take care of what’s mine (still), 2023–2024

Two channel video, sound, 25:47 minutes, 

Commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival X UniSA 

Samstag Museum of Art EXPAND Lab, 

Supported by Creative Australia 

© and courtesy of the artist

EMMALINE ZANELLI

I take care of what’s mine (still), 2023–2024

Two channel video, sound, 25:47 minutes, 

Commissioned by Adelaide Film Festival X UniSA 

Samstag Museum of Art EXPAND Lab, 

Supported by Creative Australia 

© and courtesy of the artist

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists - Curator Tim Riley Walsh

TIM RILEY WALSH

Photo: Hamish McIntosh

Primavera 2025 Curator, Tim Riley Walsh, is Assistant Curator at the MCA Australia. Previously, he was Curator in Residence, Gertrude, Naarm/Melbourne, and held roles at Camden Art Centre, London and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Magandjin/Brisbane. Riley Walsh’s MCA Australia curatorial projects include Data Dreams: Contemporary Art in the Age of AI (2025, co-curator), MCA Collection: Artists in Focus (2025, curatorium) and supporting the presentations of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine (2024) and Tarek Atoui: Waters’ Witness (2023–24). Outside of the MCA, his recent external projects include Unbecoming, La Trobe Art Institute, Djaara/Bendigo (2025) and You Are Here Too, Institute of Modern Art, Magandjin/Brisbane (co-curator, 2025).

MCA AUSTRALIA

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Tallawoladah, Gadigal Country

140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney NSW 2000

www.mca.com

Robert Klippel. A Tribute Exhibition at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney - Text by Edmund Capon + Biography

Robert Klippel

A Tribute Exhibition to Australia's Greatest Sculptor

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

9 August - 13 October 2002

When Robert Klippel died in Sydney on his 81st birthday on 19 June last year, the next day’s headlines acclaimed his artistic achievements – ‘Australia’s greatest sculptor’, ‘a sculptor with iconic status’. As early as the 1960s, Robert Hughes was claiming Robert Klippel as an outstanding figure of Australian art and one of few sculptors worthy of international attention.

While Klippel’s sculpture is extolled, he was a man who eschewed publicity, and to the public his name, unlike those of other major Australian art figures such as Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Arthur Boyd amongst others, may not be familiar.

With a career spanning 60 years of prodigious creativity, Robert Klippel worked closely with the Gallery’s curator of Australian art, Deborah Edwards, to present this first full-scale retrospective of his life’s work.

“Robert Klippel was Australia's greatest sculptor and arguably one of the most significant sculptors of his generation internationally. Klippel's particular vision, inspired by the intricacies and the profusion of our natural and man-made environments and by his quest for a spiritually relevant form, stands alone in the history of Australian art,” said Deborah Edwards.

Comprising more than 250 pieces, the exhibition encompasses Klippel’s development from figurative sculpture into abstraction, from Surrealist wood carvings to the extraordinary junk assemblages of the 1960s and 1990s. The diversity of junk materials in Klippel’s art – wood, stone, plastic toy kits, wooden pattern parts, typewriter machinery, industrial piping and machine parts – as well as bronze, silver, oils, photography, collage and paper; and the great range in scale of his work, from intimate whimsical structures in metal to the large wooden assemblages of the 1980s, are all incorporated in the exhibition.

Robert Klippel was a fossicker, and his waterfront home in Balmain a cornucopia of industrial discards. These he pondered and re-assembled into some of the most exciting works of art ever produced in this country. He created an amazing number of collages and works on paper, more than 5,000 – outlines and inspirations for his sculpture – “far too many to ever be realised into sculptures, but wonderful pictorial studies in their own right,” said Deborah Edwards.

To accompany the exhibition, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is publishing a comprehensive monograph and a CD ROM catalogue raisonne. This CD ROM catalogue raisonne is the first produced on an Australian artist, and provides detailed information on more than 1,200 of Klippel’s sculptures.

“Robert Klippel’s indefatigable instinct to make things embraced the realms of fantasy, of imagination and whimsy, but at the same time there is a sturdy reality in all thos reawakened bits and pieces of discarded industry and long lost purpose. These works of surprising contemplation and fascinating intrigue are, for me, perfect testaments to the contribution of Robert Klippel, that independent, somewhat solitary but relentlessly creative spirit.”

Edmund Capon

Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales

ROBERT KLIPPEL: A brief biography

Robert Klippel was born in 1920. At the age of six he made his first model ship after being taken on a ferry ride on Sydney Harbour. Model making became a passion – he was employed to make models of planes while he was serving in the Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships at the Gunnery Instruction Centre during World War II. While working at the Centre he was able to attend evening classes at East Sydney Technical College and, after his discharge, was able to attend for a full year.

His parents’ business was successful and with their support, he left Australia for the Slade College in London – a 6 month experience which did not satisfy his need for freedom of expression. However, in London he met the Australian painter and art critic, James Gleeson, with whom he formed a life-long friendship. In November 1948 Klippel, Gleeson and the young Lucian Freud exhibited together in London. André Breton, the originator of Surrealism, arranged for Klippel’s work to be exhibited in Paris the following year. After 18 months in Paris, Robert Klippel returned to Australia.

Australia was culturally dismal in the 1950s, and Robert Klippel's first sculptural work was not sold in this country until 1956. Nor could the artist achieve any commercial success in a short-lived career as an industrial designer. In 1957 he set sail for America, where he remained until 1963, teaching sculpture at the Minneapolis School of Art from 1958-1962. Living in New York in 1957 (and again in 1962-63) Klippel became attuned to the paintings and sculptures of the 'New York' school, and produced his first junk assemblages in 1960, using various parts and sections from old machinery (such as typewriters and cash registers). With these works he subsequently established his mature reputation as a radical new voice in Australian art, after he returned to Sydney in mid-1963.

Living in a huge old house in Birchgrove from 1968, Robert Klippel consolidated his vision and also became, by the 1970s, one of the country's most important collagists. In decades during the 1970s and 80s, when the traditional distinctions between sculpture and architecture, design, photography, performance and painting were frequently presented as obsolete, Klippel's belief in his sculpture was a commitment to the traditional, imaginative concerns of his art. He remained committed to the idea of sculpture as abstract, as occupying sculptural space, and as sustaining in ways beyond any literary or narrative function. In the 1980s he completed a series of spectacular small bronzes, as well as a large number of monumental wooden assemblages, made from the pattern-parts of early twentieth century maritime machinery.

Robert Klippel's last decades proved extremely prolific. Working with wood, metals, plastics, junk, machinery parts, oils, watercolours and paper, and utilising the techniques of casting, assemblage, painting and collage, he had completed over 1,200 sculptures by the end of the 1990s. His independence of thought continued to mark his creative life, as did the exceptional fertility and suppleness of his sculptural imagination, until his death, during his last major exhibition of work, in June 2001.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Art Gallery Road, Sydney

www.agnsw.com.au

Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, Masterpieces at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1 June - 29 July 2001

The great names in modern French art, including Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Modigliani, Derain and Picasso, are showcased at their finest in Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

This spectacular exhibition, comprising 81 paintings, is on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before touring to the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell.

These are paintings from a legendary collection founded by the great Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume, whose remarkable achievement was to persuade wealthy Parisians that avant-garde art was a highly desirable status symbol. He was the man who made collecting modern art the smart thing to do. Guillaume’s widow Domenica, who subsequently married mining tycoon Jean Walter, bequeathed the Walter Guillaume Collection to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris where it has been on view since 1984.

The collection perfectly evokes the era between the two World Wars, when there was a desire for an affirmative form of modern art that reconciled tradition with innovation, popular culture with a cosmopolitan sophistication, simplicity with opulence, pleasure with intellectual rigour.

Paul Guillaume’s collecting over a twenty year period from 1913 until his death in 1934 at the age of 42, reflects the tastes and the passion of the times – a wonderful survey of 50 years of early 20th century ‘great French painting’. Guillaume’s taste was adventurous – he was an early champion of African art, viewing its aesthetic qualities over ethnographic interests. He discovered and exhibited for the first time in Paris young and bold avant-garde artists such as de Chirico, Soutine, Utrillo and Modigliani, well ahead of their wider appeal, and acquired for his own collection some of Picasso’s, Matisse’s and Derain’s most daring paintings.

Paul Guillaume did not come from a wealthy and cultivated background, nor was he interested in simply supplying works of art for customer demand like other art dealers. Instead he actively promoted aspects of the artistic and cultural life of Paris, providing moral and material support to artists, interpreting the art of his time for his contemporaries. Guillaume was celebrated by the artists he supported – for instance in Modigliani’s portrait of him the words Novo pilota, or ‘new helmsman’ identify the sitter as being at the forefront of modern art.

Paul Guillaume’s will bequeathed the collection to the Louvre, but gave his widow Domenica complete ownership of the works during her lifetime and the ability to dispose of them as she saw fit. Although she continued to house the collection, she sold works to finance her second husband Jean Walter’s business interests. On Jean Walter’s death, the wealth he had amassed enabled her to add significantly to the Guillaume collection. Her legacy was to moderate the “primitivist” thrust of the collection, and to enrich it with more works by Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Sisley and Gauguin.

Paul Guillaume’s premature death prevented his dream of opening a museum of modern art from being realised. Domenica Guillaume-Walter honoured his intention by negotiating for their combined collection to be housed in the Tuileries Gardens in the Musée de l’Orangerie. These negotiations were only completed in 1963, with the state taking possession in 1977 following Domenica’s death. Jean Walter played no part in the development of the collection, although Domenica named it in honour of her two great loves.

Major renovations currently being undertaken at the Musee de l’Orangerie have enabled the tour of this exhibition.

Following viewing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Renoir to Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris will tour to the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell, 10 August to 30 September 2001.

An exciting addition for visitors to the exhibition is the inclusion of three paintings from Claude Monet’s famous Water Lilies series, on loan from Galerie Larock-Granoff in Paris.

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH OF WALES

Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney

www.agnsw.com.au