Collection highlights tour
Explore the Gallery in the company of former director, Edmund Capon, and hear him talk about his favourite works in the collection. The tour includes Australian art from colonial to present day, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art, Old Masters, Asian and contemporary art.
Episodes
February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
The technical and artistic excellence of Ming dynasty porcelain is without parallel. Although a tremendous variety of wares was produced, the great tradition of blue and white porcelains most confidently expresses the imperial style. The Yongle period at the beginning of the fifteenth century was one of the most glorious and productive eras in the history of Chinese art. Under the inspired patronage of the Yongle emperor all the ar...
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February 17, 2026 • 28 secs
The director, Edmund Capon, welcomes you to the Art Gallery of New South Wales
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February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
'Three studies from the Temeraire' is an oil on canvas triptych, painted between 1998-99. The history is of special interest, unusual yet evolutionary. In 1998 Twombly was working on three related but at the time independent canvases on three adjacent walls of his Gaeta studio. The theme was these ancient vessels and all the senses of myth and history they inferred - there was originally neither particular thought of Turner, an art...
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February 17, 2026 • 1 min
James Angus’s sculptures usually find their subject in things that already exist in the world. His works can be divided into two main spheres, natural creatures and man-made, often architectural structures or manufactured forms. Living things are realised in versions that emphasise their sculptural nature, and inanimate objects are shifted through a series of propositions about physics, gravity and geometry. In ‘Manta Ray’ 2002, th...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
Yorta Yorta painter, sculptor and activist, Lin Onus developed a distinctive visual language from a combination of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal imagery.
Lin Onus was unjustly expelled from school on racist grounds at the age of 14, yet later attended university. He worked as a mechanic and spray painter, before managing his father's boomerang workshop in Melbourne. A self-taught artist, Onus forged a brilliant career an...
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February 17, 2026 • 29 secs
Thank you and goodbye from Edmund Capon
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February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
Architectonic in construction and architectural in content, this magnificent 'venduta', or view, sparkles with the very light of Venice. This was subject matter tackled time and time again by Canaletto, probably with the aid of a 'camera obscura'; yet despite the artist's concern for accuracy, this painting is nowhere dull or perfunctory in its attention to detail. Having worked as a scenographic artist in the Italian perspectival ...
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February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
By the time he painted this faceless female figure, Picasso was a towering legend of modern art. Yet to say she is faceless is not entirely accurate: across her torso, breasts, belly and pudenda the painter has inscribed the disconcerting semblance of his own features. Her nipples are the tell-tale black pupils of his eyes, her serrated vagina is his equally aggressive mouth. Having thus invaded her body, his own erupts in the man...
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February 17, 2026 • 1 min
Guilio Paolini came to international note as a leading member of the arte povera group in Italy in 1967. Like the others, he uses found materials and often introduces historical and literary references into his imagery. Works such as this have a poetic quality that is common with arte povera and yet there is a strong conceptual and critical streak that is not normally associated with the group. Many of his installations directly cr...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
'Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss' is the title of each of two works, one painting and one floor installation. It is not uncommon for Kiefer to use the same titles again and again. This is because of his sustained commitment to certain themes that he pursues over many years. These two works represent two such themes in Kiefer's development and although they look very different as...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
Bill Henson's first solo exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 when he was 19 years old, heralded the beginnings of a unique photographic vision of the Australian landscape. Known for his brooding imagery and exacting artistic process, Henson alludes to the darkness of Caravaggio, the lightness of Purcell and the drama of Wagner. The intensity and intimacy of his images broach the boundary of the painterly an...
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February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
As one of the founding artists of 'Die Brücke' group in 1905, Kirchner is essential to the history of German expressionism, a movement he virtually personifies. Trained in Munich and Dresden, he was attracted to neo-impressionism, van Gogh and tribal artefacts, combining influences from all three in his searingly emotional paintings, drawings and prints. His woodcuts and woodcarvings combine traditional German folk forms with more ...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
The 'golden age' of Japanese screen painting occurred in the 1600s in Kyoto, when these brilliantly realised screens were painted by Kano Eino, third generation head of the Kyoto Kano school. The style had emerged in the confidently flamboyant Momoyama period (1568-1615) as the brash and newly emergent samurai elite sought an ostentatious display of their own power and wealth. It was their patronage that created for the first time ...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
Though never officially a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this colleague of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris was, by inclination and practice, sympathetic to the realist ambitions of the movement. Born in Calais, Madox Brown studied in Belgium and was influenced by the German Nazarene painters in Rome before his first liaison with Pre-Raphaelitism. Working with pure colours and clear contours on a dazzling white ...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
This finely crafted regal figure of the Buddha is depicted in a strong frontal stance wearing long, flowing monastic robes, scalloped at the hems and gathered in front with a jewelled girdle. While the smooth and naturalistic modelling of the torso gives the appearance of a bare upper body, the Buddha's robes are in fact draped over both shoulders where an elaborate necklace or collar disguises the neckline of the garment. In addit...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
Purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation in 1994, 'Woman of Venice VII' is the first sculpture by Alberto Giacometti to enter a public art collection in Australia. It is one of nine bronze figures that were created as 'states' of a single figure modelled in clay on a single armature over a period of about three weeks and cast in plaster by the artist's brother, Diego. The hands held at the side of the figure's bro...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
In a seeming contradiction of its substance as an object, this unusual jar carries inscriptions from a Buddhist text on nothingness. The potter, a Buddhist who lives in the mountains of Kwangju, believes that dedication and painstaking effort are an essential part of the creative process. His work is praised for its individuality and for its imaginative embrace of antiquity, particularly the austere but beautiful aesthetic of the u...
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February 17, 2026 • 3 mins
Throughout its construction, which was completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge inspired many artists to redefine their visions of the city and the harbour by incorporating this new industrial structure. This painting shows the massive frame-work in mid-construction, emerging from the shores of North Sydney. It reveals Grace Cossington Smith’s view of the bridge as a dynamic work-in-progress.
In a powerful translation of forms...
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February 17, 2026 • 2 mins
Rusty Peters, like many East Kimberley painters, spent his youth working as a stockman on cattle stations throughout the Kimberley, and earned a reputation as an accomplished horse breaker. Along with other Gija community elders, Peters was influential in establishing the Ngalangangpum bicultural school – the first school at the main Gija community Warmun (Turkey Creek) – ensuring that instruction in Gija law and culture was promin...
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February 17, 2026 • 1 min
E Phillips Fox, one of a generation of late 19th-century Australian expatriates in Europe, is renowned for his cosmopolitan and superbly coloured images painted in Paris.
'The ferry' is the artist’s masterpiece. It was developed from rapid sketches that Fox painted outdoors at Trouville, a favourite beach resort in the north of France, and was completed in his Paris studio the following winter. Fox positions the viewer as if peeri...
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