Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940
AGNSW’s summer exhibition traces the bold journeys of 50 Australian women who reshaped the nation’s artistic landscape.
Overview
The Art Gallery of NSW is spotlighting an often-overlooked chapter of Australian art history with Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940. This landmark exhibition showcases more than 200 works by 50 pioneering women who left Australia to train, experiment and exhibit in the cultural capitals of Europe — long before modernism took hold back home.
The survey period was one of radical change: those century-straddling decades saw the advent of the automobile, aeroplanes and moving pictures, as well as two world wars, breakthroughs in women's suffrage and the emergence of artistic movements like fauvism, cubism and abstraction. While Australia took a little longer to catch up, the artists featured in Dangerously Modern embedded themselves in studios, salons and artist colonies from Paris and London to the windswept coasts of Ireland. The show traces how these experiences shaped their practices — and how they returned with new ideas that transformed Australia's artistic landscape.
Installation view of the 'Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940' exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 11 October 2025 – 15 February 2026, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Anna Kučera
Expect works by big names like Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and Nora Heysen alongside under-recognised artists including Justine Kong Sing, Agnes Goodsir and Iso Rae. Highlights include the only known surviving major painting by 19th-century artist Eleanor Ritchie Harrison, a suite of post-impressionist paintings by Edith Collier — marking the Aotearoa-born artist's first Australian showing — and the earliest known cubist landscape by an Australian artist, painted by Mary Cockburn Mercer in 1925 and recently rediscovered in Germany.
Whether you're an art buff or just keen to see something different, Dangerously Modern offers a rare opportunity to view long-unseen works and reconsider who gets remembered in Australia's creative story.
Installation view of the 'Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940' exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 11 October 2025 – 15 February 2026, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Anna Kučera
Top image: Installation view of the Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 11 October 2025 – 15 February 2026, featuring Hilda Rix Nicholas 'Une Australienne (An Australian)' 1926, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 2014 © Bronwyn Wright, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, image by Anna Kučera.
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