10 Sydney Art Moments You Won't Want To Miss

Sydney's exhibition calendar is stacked right now, and it stays stacked for the next several seasons. Between now and next spring, the city has a major Sidney Nolan survey, an Australian premiere of an immersive David Hockney production, and two international blockbusters landing back to back through the NSW Government's Sydney International Art Series. Keep reading to learn about what's worth building a trip around, organized by when to go.

Sydney Contemporary 2025 at CarriageWorks, exterior view

Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks | Eveleigh | 3 to 6 September 2026

Australasia's biggest contemporary art fair turns ten this year. More than 100 galleries and 500 artists from over 30 countries take over Carriageworks' industrial rail yards for four days of booth talks, large-scale installations, and live performance. It is the single best weekend to see the region's gallery scene in one place, and this year's anniversary edition is drawing an even bigger program than usual.

Emily Ferretti Keen to see 2024 (detail) © the artist, photo: Damian Dillon

Near At Hand: Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2026 | Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Nura Building | The Domain | 12 Sept - March 2027

Eleven Australian artists working in pencil, pastel, ceramic, light, and thread make up the sixth edition of this biennial, which treats drawing as a wide open medium rather than a warm-up act for painting. It is free, it opens right as the fall season kicks off, which makes it an easy add to any Sydney itinerary between now and March.

Tony Albert, Story, Place, 2023, Tia Collection © Tony Albert, image courtesy the artist, Tia Collection and Sullivan + Strumpf, photograph: Rhett Hammerton

Tony Albert: Not a Souvenir | Museum of Contemporary Art Australia | The Rocks | Closes 19 October 2026

This is Tony Albert's largest institutional solo show to date, and it closes sooner than everything else on this list, so it belongs at the top of the pile for early fall visitors. Albert brings together two decades of sculpture, photography, painting, and installation alongside newly commissioned work, drawing on his ongoing collection of what he calls Aboriginalia: the mass-produced souvenirs and kitsch objects that trafficked in stereotypes of Aboriginal people throughout the twentieth century. The show takes its site seriously too, staged at the MCA's harbourfront home in The Rocks, a place with its own complicated colonial history and its own present-day souvenir economy.

White Rabbit Gallery (Zhu Jinshi “The Ship of Time” (2018), featured in “Black Myth” exhibition, courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery)

Black Myth | White Rabbit Gallery | Chippendale | 25 June to 15 November 2026

White Rabbit's current exhibition takes its cue from an unlikely source: the 2024 video game Black Myth: Wukong, itself a retelling of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West. More than 40 contemporary Chinese artists respond to the idea of the journey in every sense, physical, spiritual, and imagined, through painting, woodcut, photography, and installation. As always at White Rabbit, entry is free and the collection belongs to philanthropist Judith Neilson, who has built one of the most significant holdings of Chinese contemporary art in the world purely so people can walk in off the street and see it.

Nolan: Origins | Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Nura building | 3 October 2026 to 7 February 2027

A major survey of Sidney Nolan's formative years, tracing the paintings that would go on to define how Australia sees its own outback mythology, from the Ned Kelly series to his early depictions of Central Australia. This is the first of two headline exhibitions the Art Gallery is running through summer, and it gives visitors a long runway: five months on view, right through the height of the Southern Hemisphere summer.

Photo by Justin Sutcliffe © David Hockney

David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away) | Carriageworks, Eveleigh | 22 October 2026 to 24 January 2027

Direct from London's Lightroom and making its Australian debut, this is a four-sided, floor-to-ceiling immersive production built around nearly 250 of Hockney's works, with a score by Nico Muhly and narration recorded by Hockney himself. The production has already toured to Manchester, Shanghai, and Seoul to more than 650,000 visitors, and it carries extra weight in Sydney this year: Hockney died in June 2026, a few months before the show's Australian premiere, making this one of the first major presentations of his work anywhere since his passing.

A Day Trip Worth Taking

Kirtika Kain, ‘Pitch’, installation view, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2026. Photo: Silversalt Photography.

Campbelltown Arts Centre | Campbelltown (about an hour from Sydney) | Daily 10am to 4pm

Campbelltown Arts Centre's marquee annual exhibition is now in its 64th edition. The Fisher's Ghost Art Award carries more than $60,000 in prize money across its categories, anchored by a $50,000 Open Award that allows the winner to join a public collection that has been built one prize at a time for decades. Past Open Award winners include Elisabeth Cummings, Khaled Sabsabi, Justene Williams, and Marion Borgelt, so the finalist list tends to punch above its regional profile. The exhibition coincides with the Festival of Fisher's Ghost, a ten-day civic celebration dating back to 1956 built around the legend of Frederick Fisher's ghost, and 2026 doubles as both the festival's 70th anniversary and the 200th anniversary of the Fisher legend itself, so expect a bigger showing than usual. Worth combining with a full day out west, since CAC also has gardens and a cafe on site.

Worth Planning A Later Trip Around

These three open in November and December, but they are the biggest ticket items on Sydney's calendar for the next year, and all of them run well into 2027. If your trip is more flexible on timing, these are worth building the itinerary around instead.

Powerhouse Parramatta Exterior Drone Shot courtesy of Powerhouse Parramatta

Powerhouse Parramatta | Parramatta, Western Sydney | Opens 7 November 2026

Sydney gets a brand new $915 million museum this fall. This is the sister institution to the still-closed Powerhouse Ultimo (the Ultimo building remains under heritage revitalization, with reopening expected in 2027), and it opens with five major exhibitions and more than 3,000 objects spanning applied arts, design, and science, most of it free. It is a genuine new cultural landmark for the city, not a satellite outpost, and it is the first new state cultural institution built for Western Sydney.

Philippe Parreno: 5 Moons | Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 140 George Street, The Rocks | 21 November 2026 to 26 April 2027

The first major Australian exhibition of French artist Philippe Parreno, presented as part of the 2026-27 Sydney International Art Series. Parreno works across film, sound, light, and choreographed environments that treat the exhibition itself as a living, shifting composition rather than a fixed set of objects on walls. Given its five-month run, this is one to plan a spring 2027 trip around if fall doesn't line up.

Takashi Murakami Cherry Blossoms Fujiyama JAPAN (detail) 2020 ©2020 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Takashi Murakami | Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Badu building | 5 December 2026 to 18 July 2027

Australia's first dedicated Murakami retrospective, and it is a big one: 30 years and more than 150 works, including new pieces created specifically for Sydney and making their global debut here before anywhere else. The show traces Murakami's Superflat movement from its 1990s origins through his collaborations with everyone from BLACKPINK to Louis Vuitton. Early-bird tickets are on sale now, with prices increasing after the show opens in December.

All five of the above (Nolan, Murakami, Hockney, Parreno, and the new Powerhouse) are part of the same wave: a coordinated push, backed by Destination NSW's Sydney International Art Series, to make Sydney the place with the exhibitions to see over the coming year, not just the harbor to look at.