With a market generating $2.5 billion in 2023, art galleries and museums are an industry in Australia that pulls their weight in the overall arts scene. The Localista guides feature over 1400 distinct listings of art galleries, ranging from fine arts, open-air sculptures and arts studios spaces. With a perfect mix of up-and-comers and classic masters, traditional media and unique innovation, we wouldn’t miss a visit into at least one of our nation’s art institutions.
Our art galleries, first and foremost, showcase Australian artists. Famed and celebrated Australian painters find themselves as permanent fixtures in our public art galleries as a measure to preserve not only their beautiful art, but their continuing legacy and importance to the Australian art scene. The Canberra Museum and Gallery is home to the Nolan Collection, a group of paintings that spanned an eight year period of iconic Australian modernist Sidney Nolan’s life. His most recognisable paintings depict Australian folk-hero and bushranger Ned Kelly, most of which are found in the National Gallery of Australia, also in Canberra. We feel it’s only fitting that this sequence is on show in our capital city, and that viewing the collection provides an insight into the ’why’ behind Australian cultural symbols like nothing else.
Other famed artists from the Australian canon on show in our galleries include Tom Roberts, with his Shearing the Rams at the National Gallery of Victoria, Frederick McCubbin’s On The Wallaby Track at the Art Gallery of NSW, and Brett Whiteley’s Self portrait in the studio, again at AGNSW.
So far, these artists adhere to a strict demographic of artist; it is important to recognise that our art galleries are committed to displaying the works of a diverse range of artists, with particular emphasis placed on paying respect to the artworks of Indigenous artists. Art galleries in the major cities aren’t strangers to this. The Art Gallery of Western Australia, residing in Perth’s Cultural Centre, is crowned with a 34-metre long commission by Indigenous artist Christopher Pease at its rooftop, both a stunning artwork and a gesture that prioritises the growth and support for Indigenous artists.
It is not surprising that the region with the highest quantity of Indigenous galleries belongs to the Northern Territory, given 30 percent of the population there identifies as Indigenous. Alice Springs has 16 different Indigenous-specific galleries to peruse, and even at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, home to the iconic Uluru rock formation, is an Indigenous art gallery (Maruku Arts) and an arts centre (Walkatjara Art Uluru), where visitors can support the artists while discovering the rich culture at Australia’s heart.
The less-conventionally-accessed Indigenous art shouldn’t be ignored, either. Aboriginal rock carvings, art and cave paintings are important cultural artefacts not just to their local communities, but to the history of humanity as a whole. Some Indigenous rock art has been dated to over 20 000 years old. Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory features rock galleries at Burrungkuy, Nanguluwurr and Ubirr. Seven rock sites make up the National Heritage List—the Dampier Archipelago (WA), Grampians National Park (VIC), Koonalda Cave (SA), along with the previously mentioned Kakadu National Park, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, and the Tasmanian Wilderness and West Kimberly regions. To see the animals we know today depicted on rock dating back tens of thousands of years really puts into perspective the history and age of our land and its First Peoples.