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Closed: Reopening 10 July 2026

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Past Exhibitions

Dive into our exhibition history. This archive is a work in progress – we’ll be continually adding to it.

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102 exhibitions

2026

Wet Archives

A velvet ant, a flower and a bird

The shape of us: recent acquisitions

2025

Our Way: Celebrating Indigenous Art

Illuminating Minds – Professor Margaret Manion and the Making of Art History at the University of Melbourne

65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art

2023

Ancient Lives: Insights from the Classics and Archaeology Collection

2022

Collective Unease

Emu Sky

2018

Clement Meadmore: The Art of Mid-century Design

Eavesdropping

State of the Union

Meredith Turnbull: Closer

Stieg Persson: Polyphonic

2017

All the Better to See You with: Fairy Tales Transformed

Angela Brennan: Forms of life

The Score

John Akomfrah: Vertigo Sea

EXIT

Syria: Ancient History – Modern Conflict

Not as the Songs of Other Land: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting

2016

Sister Corita’s Summer of Love

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: In the Beginning

Don’t Be Too Polite: Posters and Activism

The Dead Don’t Bury Themselves

In the Saddle – On the Wall

Basil Sellers Art Prize 5

Images of Life: Ancient Greek Vases

Susan Norrie: Field Work 2006–2016

Fabrik: Conceptual, Minimalist and Performative Approaches to Textiles

Love of Beauty, Love of Country: The Collection of Dr Samuel Arthur Ewing

2015

My Learned Object: Collections & Curiosities

William Kentridge: Drawn from Africa

An Illumination: The Rothschild Prayer Book and Other Works from the Kerry Stokes Collection c.1280-1685

Julie Rrap: Remaking the World

More Love Hours: Contemporary Artists and Craft

Brook Andrew. Sanctuary: Tombs of the Outcasts

Public Smog

Weird Melancholy: The Australian Gothic

Nature/Revelation

2014

Richard Avedon People

Norman Macgeorge: An Unlikely Modernist

Between Artefact and Text

Everyday Imagining: New Perspectives on Outsider Art

Basil Sellers Art Prize 4

North South East West: Visions of Mid-19th Century Victoria from the University of Melbourne Art Collection

The Less There Is to See the More Important It Is to Look

Secret Lives, Forgotten Stories: Highlights from Heritage Victoria's Archaeological Collection

Stephen Bush: Steenhuffel

The World Is Not a Foreign Land

The Piranesi Effect

2013

Transformations: Early Bark Paintings from Arnhem Land

Jericho to Jerusalem

Designing 'the Shop': the Parkville Campus Past and Future

Gigi Scaria: Dust

Under the Sun: the Kate Challis RAKA Award 2013

Philip Brophy: Colour Me Dead

Heat in the Eyes: New Acquisitions 2010–13

The John Hugh Sutton Collection

Joachim Koester: Tarantism

Frances Stark: My Best Thing

Seeing the Natural World: Birds, Animals and Plants of Australia

Far-famed City of Melbourne

Polish Poster Art 1952–84

2012

Based on a True Story: Geoff Lowe 1972–92 and A Constructed World 1993–2012

Gigi Scaria: Prisms of Perception

Jitish Kallat: Circa

The Anatomy Lesson

Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012

Ceramic Art of Ancient Cyprus

Inner Worlds: Portraits and Psychology

Visions: Selected Landscapes from the Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Collection

Post-planning: Damiano Bertoli, Julian Hooper, Andrew Hurle, Alex Martinis Roe, Michelle Nikou

Visions Past and Present: Celebrating Forty Years

Jenny Watson: Here, There and Everywhere

2011

Wolfgang Sievers: Images of the University of Melbourne 1956–76

Mis-design

Groundwork

Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land

Casts and Copies: Ancient and Classical Reproductions

Experimental Gentlemen: Works from the Sir Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Collection

Trademarks: International Indigenous Culture from the Leonhard Adam Collection

The Graphic Wit of Roland Topor: Posters from the Gerard Herbst Poster Collection

Model Pictures

2010

There's No Time: John Spiteri, Mira Gojak, Bradd Westmoreland, Karl Wiebke

The Collection of Dr Samuel Arthur Ewing

Tim Jones: The Phantom and the City

Basil Sellers Art Prize 2010

Raafat Ishak: Recipes for Aversion and Strategy. Work in Progress #6

Melbourne > < Brisbane: Punk, Art and After

2009

The Shilo Project

Tim Johnson: Painting Ideas

Text and Textiles

Journeys and Places: Landscape Etchings by Jan van de Velde II

Yvonne Audette: Six Decades of Painting

Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Paintings and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection

Other Side Art: Trevor Nickolls, a Survey of Paintings and Drawings 1972–2007

Selected Artefacts from the David and Marion Adams Collection

Sweet Spot

Song of Sirens

Intelligentsia: Louis Kahan's Portraits of Writers