Australian Art

Australian art incorporates art made in Australia or about Australian subjects since prehistoric times. This includes Australian Aboriginal art, Australian Colonial art, Landscape, Atelier, Modernist and Contemporary art. The visual arts have a long history in Australia, with evidence of Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. Australia has produced many notable artists from both Western and Indigenous Australian traditions including the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolourists (most notably Albert Namatjira), Western Desert Art Movement, Heide Circle of Modernists, and the expatriates who worked in London in the 1960s. Traditionally the art market has strongly supported oil paintings of expressionistic figuration and Australian landscapes in various styles. In the work of artists Eugene Von Guerard, Arthur Streeton, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Louise Hearman, the human figure has been placed within an Australian landscape. Indigenous dot painting is often sub-categorized as abstract art and landscape painting. Since the end of the Australian colonial art boom in the eighties the mainstream art market has increasingly accepted Craft, Photography, Abstract art and Urban art, transnational art genres that artists have been quick to adopt. In photography, Harold Cazneaux, Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers, Mark Strizic, Rennie Ellis and Tracey Moffatt are examples of artists noted for their documentation of urban Australia.

Australia has a number of major museums and galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery of Australia and National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Notable Indigenous sites have been set aside as UNESCO listed areas such as those at Uluru and Kakadu National Park.