Australian art

The work of Australian artists has been collected by the Queensland Art Gallery since its foundation in 1895. These works date from the colonial period onwards, with rich holdings of paintings and sculptures by Australian expatriate artists living in the United Kingdom and France at the turn of the twentieth century. The Australian art collection tracks developments in the modern movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including abstractions and assemblages and conceptual/post-object art of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Contemporary Australian Art collection is rich in paintings, major installation, cross-media and moving image works which are central to contemporary art practice. The Collection includes an outstanding group of works by major Queensland artists.

See the Australian Collection display at QAG. The reconfigured spaces capture major historical moments from first contact to colonisation, and exploration to immigration. Bringing the Indigenous and contemporary Australian collections together with the Gallery’s historical holdings, the display emphasises stories about Queensland and Brisbane from the region’s own perspective.