From the return of the phenomenally successful Melbourne Now exhibition and a show celebrating the women of Hollywood, to a celebration of the connections between Australia, Asia and the Great Ocean, Tiarney Miekus looks ahead to 2023 and selects what she’s looking forward to in the coming year.

Clarice Beckett: Atmosphere, Geelong Gallery, April 1-July 9

The popularity of Australian modernist painter Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) has been rising stratospherically in the last few years, bolstered by the 2021 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Soon, these mesmerising paintings, famous for capturing atmosphere, will be showing at Geelong Gallery. Beckett isn’t a modernist of the hard-line variety; she’s more of a spiritual, gentle modernist who captured scenes en plein air. And these paintings are stunning; landscapes are shown through light and climate, capturing weather, dawn and dusk in its rich, otherworldly haziness. Beckett was trained at Max Meldrum’s art school where tonalism was championed (illustrating surroundings via their atmosphere), and she eventually surpassed Meldrum himself. The Geelong Gallery exhibition will show more than 60 paintings, taking a particularly local perspective.

Hayley Millar Baker: Nyctinasty, Gertrude Contemporary, February 11-March 26

Although Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung artist Hayley Millar Baker is foremost known for her poignant black-and-white photographs exploring memory, identity and Aboriginal experiences, she recently delved into video, creating the cinematic work, Nyctinasty. The short film first showed at the National Gallery of Australia for the 4th National Indigenous Triennial: Ceremony, and will also screen at Gertrude Contemporary. Nyctinasty is extremely personal, expressing Baker’s own experiences of self-preservation and the links between physical and spiritual worlds. It looks at the big questions — the connections between life, death and the afterlife — but also delves into her own psyche and domestic sphere. By further looking at female strength through tropes of the horror genre, Baker centres women’s empowerment alongside histories of magic and spirituality; the intimate is a form of wider revelation.

Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, March 24-August 20

After its triumphant debut in 2013, Melbourne Now is back a decade later. Bringing together more than 200 artists from across Victoria, it celebrates creatives who are impacting our cultural landscape in innovative, brilliant ways. Taking over all levels of NGV Australia at Federation Square, it will feature emerging to senior artists across a plenitude of disciplines: painting, ceramics, sculpture, fashion, jewellery, performance, photography, printmaking, publishing, video and virtual reality. While the exhibition will no doubt strengthen a sense of community among Victorian artists (it was heartening to see the congratulations across the art world on social media when the exhibiting artists were announced), the show will also hopefully achieve what should be an enshrined mission for one of this state’s most esteemed galleries: showing local audiences the incredible art created in their own city.

A Female Gaze, MARS Gallery, March 1-25

Painting has long been a form in which female artists grapple with the sexist history of aesthetics and the art world — and life in general. The relationship between sexism and painting is navigated in A Female Gaze. The title itself implies the ongoing mission to circumnavigate the typical male gaze of art history — a gaze that women painters are feeling pretty done with. Featuring artists Dani McKenzie, Eliza Gosse, Jo Bertini, Lucy Roleff, Sis Cowie and Marissa Mu, the works will span from the figurative to abstract. While Cowie looks at the nude female form, bypassing the reductive idea that all female nudes must be attributed to the male gaze, McKenzie paints women with agency, such as young business owner Effie Rose and her florist in St Kilda. Underlying the exhibition is the plain fact that art does not have to be explicitly embroiled in sexual politics to be feminist and quietly impacting.

TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili, TarraWarra Museum of Art, April 1-July 16

The 9th TarraWarra Biennial will examine connections between the people of Australia, Asia and the Great Ocean. Curated by Dr Léuli Eshrāghi – a genuinely thought-provoking curator and artist — the Biennial will feature new works by 15 artists and groups. The title ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili is a Samoan proverb which means “the canoe obeys the wind”. It links to celestial navigation practices of the Great Ocean region surrounding Australia, which was revived in the 1970s for teaching the interconnectedness of all things: of humans and islands, reefs, stars, suns, moons, currents, winds and other beings. With increasing polarisation between humans and non-human entities, the show is a call for human humility. A sample of artists includes Sonja Carmichael (Quandamooka) and Elisa Jane Carmichael (Quandamooka), The Unbound Collective, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar and Elyas Alavi. With the Eurocentric and American focus on art in this country, there is often a surface engagement with surrounding Oceanic communities — which this show looks beyond.

Goddess, ACMI, April 5-October 1

There’s a certain seduction surrounding the complicated glamour and politics of Hollywood’s leading women, from actors to directors to screenwriters, and ACMI will this year pay tribute to such women with Goddess. Featuring costumes, cinematic artefacts, props, immersive installations and large-scale projections, the show examines how representations of womanhood and feminism have changed across cinematic history. Think objects like the costumes worn by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991), or Michelle Yeoh’s silks from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The show centres defiant women characters from the silent era to villains and heroines — women who have either redefined, or completely dismantled, the feminine ideal. Goddess will also feature off-screen conversations on significant roles such as Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930), Tilda Swinton in Orlando (1992) and Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey (2020).

Wanapati Yunupiŋu: ṉilŋṉilŋ’ (the spark), Tolarno Galleries, February 11-March 4

After Wanapati Yunupiŋu’s father passed away — the artist and spiritual leader Miniyawany Yunupiŋu — the younger Yunupiŋu continued the cultural practice of painting on bark and larrakitj, sharing stories of his Gumatj clan. Yunupiŋu lives in the remote Gumatj homeland of Birany Birany, Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory — it’s a small coastal community where time is passed through the ceremonial and seasonal calendars. As his painting practice developed, Yunupiŋu also began to be influenced by peer and artist Gunybi Ganambarr, who is known for exquisite etchings into found objects. Soon, Yunupiŋu found his own style, etching sacred Gumatj clan narratives onto metal and aluminium surfaces found littered across North East Arnhem land. The results are an incredible, shimmering transformations of discarded street signage and found objects, which will be showing at Tolarno Galleries — in all their spirituality and formal innovation.

Callum Morton: Inside Out, Anna Schwartz Gallery, February 11-April 15

I’ve often thought of Callum Morton’s art as artificial constructs of artificial constructs. For over four decades he’s created installations, scale models, sculptures and public artworks of architectural elements. Readers would likely have seen his brilliant Hotel on the Eastlink freeway, and he exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, creating a dishevelled building which hosted an existential foyer inside, complete with lobby music, and is now housed at TarraWarra Museum of Art. His work looks at the social aspects of buildings — such as memory, time and capitalism — considering how people interact with their environment. There’s often an equal dose comedy and melancholia; one never knows whether to smile or feel anxious, or both. For Inside Out, Morton will present six large-scale paintings referencing the windows of the Sirius Building in Sydney, capturing various perspectives to consider how spaces and times become lost or hidden.

James Nguyen: Open Glossary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, September 16-November 19

When James Nguyen was awarded an $80,0000 commission from the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission to create new works to exhibit at ACCA, I couldn’t think of anyone more worthy. Vietnam-born but raised in Melbourne, Nguyen left his job as a pharmacist to study art, with a practice now spanning performance, video, drawing and installation. His work centres on personal history, representation, colonialism, displacement and migration in poignant but also comic and absurd ways. Open Glossary will be an installation looking at the language and terms that permeate society, exhibiting multilingual toolkits that aim to bring non-English and plain-English speaking communities into the art world — a world that partly maintains its exclusivity through insider language. Nguyen acknowledges how those outside this world may feel like their voices can’t engage — but such voices are particularly important when many artists are also pushing for social change.

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, November 25, 2023-February 18, 2024

“After my first show,” said artist Elizabeth Gower, “a critic warned me that my work looked ‘feminine’. I was horrified at this description and felt very vulnerable and angry at myself for not hiding my ‘femaleness’ better; but I was also incredibly relieved that now the secret was out, I wouldn’t have to pretend anymore.” In 2020 the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) launched the canonical, two-part exhibition, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists. It was part of NGA’s larger project of publications, programs and acquisition planning to centre this country’s women artists. An iteration will exhibit at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, spanning multiple disciplines and styles with artists including Margaret Preston, Joy Hester, Grace Cossington Smith, N. Yunupiŋu and Anne Wallace — to name just a few. Whether you feel such vast group shows should be redirected to solo exhibitions or applaud this commitment to Australian women artists (or both, simultaneously), this is undeniably history in action.

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