As the leaves fall and light softens, May invites a quiet contemplation — and across Australia, galleries are responding in kind. This month’s exhibitions span the deeply personal and the politically charged, from the tender figurations of seven female painters at Ngununggula to digital materialities at Artspace, where the screen and body intersect. In Sydney, threads and time entwine in Plant Stories, while Archana Hande’s illuminated data sculptures map memory as rhythm. Travel north for Danie Mellor’s haunting reflections on Country, or to Victoria where 65,000 years of culture unfurl in a landmark exhibition of First Nations art. We also trace Odysseus’s long journey home through Kirsten Coelho’s porcelain vessels, and revisit fifty years of Donald Judd’s concrete presence in Adelaide.

Whether you’re in the tropics, the desert or the inner city, this is our Australian art guide for May 2025.

NSW

CASSANDRA BIRD

Unfolding Earth – from 7 May 2025

The exhibition presents Juz Kitson’s sculptural works, where materials like porcelain, fur, bone, wax, and glass are used to create lifeforms that explore cycles of rebirth, memory, and the entanglement between nature and the body.

Artspace

Amongst the clouds (digital materialities in the 21st century) – from 8 May to 20 July 2025

Profiling Australian and international artists (like Liu Chuang, China, Nina Davies, Canada/UK, Archana Hande, India, and more...) who explore the ways in which digital realms are determinedly tied to the physical world. As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, how we think about art, society and technology is radically shifting and evolving.

Garden Gallery (Royal Botanic Garden Sydney)

Plant Stories in Threads– from 5–21 May 2025

This exhibition features intricate textile artworks made by the GUL Collective – a group of women artists and storytellers from Western Sydney, brought together through ACE’s Multicultural Women’s Hub – exploring plants as vessels for memory, cultural identity and connection to place. Over the past two years, they’ve explored the links between flora, family, and heritage through collaborative workshops led by artist Paula do Prado.

Ngununggula

Tender – until 15 June 2025

A major new all-women exhibition featuring seven leading Australian painters, Sally Anderson, Sarah Drinan, Laura Jones, India Mark, Dionisia Salas, Julia Trybala and Amber Wallis. It delves into the concept of ‘tenderness’, a term often associated with notions of care and femininity, to explore its significance and many meanings beyond a gendered lens.

Bank Art Museum Moree (BAMM)

In Her Own Time – until 31 May 2025

This exhibition presents a collection of paintings and newly acquired works on paper and canvas by celebrated Australian artist Elisabeth Cummings. Recently gifted to the BAMM collection, this remarkable series of works spanning half a century of her distinguished career, celebrates the artist’s bold use of colour, dynamic mark-making, and deep connection to the Australian landscape whilst offering an intimate insight into the breadth of her practice, from her personal life, travels and landscapes.

Rainbow Studios

Double Bounce – from 22 May 2025

The debut solo exhibition by Sydney-based artist and designer Cat Yenn offers a playful meditation on emotional tension, nostalgia, and the physics of feeling. Hand-painted and entirely analogue, her works transform weighty emotion into moments of levity—like the fleeting thrill of a trampoline’s second bounce.

VIC

Potter Museum of Art (University of Melbourne)

65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art – from 30 May 2025

An exhibition celebrating the brilliance and beauty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art while confronting the dark heart of Australia’s colonial history, including rarely seen works of art and cultural objects from the University of Melbourne’s collections alongside 193 important loans from 77 public and private lenders. Includes work by: William Barak, Lin Onus, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Albert Namatjira, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Emily Kam Kngwarray, and more.

Sullivan+Strumpf

The trees are mended. That winter is washed away – until 3 May 2025

This new solo exhibition from internationally acclaimed Adelaide-based artist Kirsten Coelho (renowned for her contemporary porcelain creations) takes its inspiration from narratives within Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, which chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home city and to his wife Penelope, after the fall of Troy. Alongside her porcelain installations, Kirsten will also present a new series of works on paper focusing on the lives and deaths of Penelope’s ill-fated hand maidens.

QLD

Edwina Corlette

Paradise Garden – until 6 May 2025

Artist Miranda Skoczek presents her signature large-scale paintings, with many influenced by paradise gardens — Islamic or Persian spaces of order and sanctuary, planted as microcosms of an ideal, spiritual world. Skoczek has visited paradise gardens in India, Morocco and Spain, becoming entranced by the mimicry of paradise on Earth.

Queensland Art Gallery

marru | the unseen visible – until 3 Aug 2025

Danie Mellor’s multidisciplinary art practice explores Australia’s shared history through the lens of his Ngadjon-jii, Mamu and Anglo-Celtic ancestry and ongoing connection to Country in the Atherton Tablelands and rainforests of far north Queensland. This exhibition brings together works examining memory and remembrance; the relationship between First Nations people, culture and Country; and the environmental and social impact of colonial history.

Montville Art Gallery

Wish You Were Here – until 31 May 2025

Belgian-born artist Julie Lucht de Freibruch presents a series of paintings inspired by her local environment, exploring Queensland’s vibrant tropical landscapes, its nature and distinctive buildings.

NT

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

Exit Art – until 25 May 2025

An exhibition celebrating of the talents and creativity of the next generation of artists and designers, presenting the very best contemporary art and design from Northern Territory Year 12 students.

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Araluen Arts Centre

Know My Name – until 11 May 2025

This exhibition tells a new story of Australian art, looking to moments in which women created new forms of art and cultural commentary. It suggests new histories by highlighting creative and intellectual relationships between artists through time.

SA

Art Gallery South Australia (AGSA)

50 years of Donald Judd's Untitled, 1974–75 – until 17 Aug 2025

The influential artist, designer, architect and art critic, Donald Judd (1928–1994) was one of America’s leading postwar artists when he designed the large site-specific concrete sculpture Untitled for the rear of the Gallery in 1974. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of its unveiling. Revered by some, subjected to protests by others, it has been a significant presence on the back lawn of the Gallery over five decades.

WA

Art Gallery Western Australia (AGWA)

Material Practice: Howard Taylor’s Journal – until 1 June 2025

This exhibition invites you to witness firsthand the evolution of one of Western Australia’s most significant artists, Howard Taylor, seen through artworks in the collection along with pages from his Journal.