Image: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The exhibition is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square, Level 3, from 4 September 2026 to 31 January 2027. It spans still lifes, ceramics, woodcut prints and other forms of Margaret Preston’s work, alongside contemporary responses to her work by First Nations artists.
NGV describes Preston’s art as having shaped Australia’s cultural and aesthetic landscape. Born in Adelaide in 1875, Preston, née McPherson, studied in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne before travelling extensively through England and Europe.
As she engaged with the growing discourses surrounding modernism, Preston merged influences including Post-Impressionism, primitivism in European art, the Arts and Craft movement and Japanese ukiyo-e.
Her early prints combined Japanese ukiyo-e with designs appropriated from First Nations cultural material. Those prints also marked her embrace of woodblock printing as the defining feature of Sydney modernism. After studying the process overseas, Preston was considered a well-respected authority on woodblock printing by Sydney’s artistic community.
Artists such as Thea Proctor were introduced to the medium by Preston, who gave Proctor her first block to cut.
