Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits

Visitors will be left in awe with the National Portrait Gallery and National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s (NFSA) new star-studded exhibition.

Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits explores the striking, beautiful portraiture emerging from 100 years of Australian movies. Curators of the show, Penelope Grist, Assistant Curator at the Portrait Gallery, and Jennifer Coombes, Curator at the NFSA had a wealth of items to draw on for the exhibition.

Toni Collette as Muriel, trying on a wedding dress – "Muriel’s Wedding", 1994. Image by by Robert McFarlane.
Toni Collette as Muriel, trying on a wedding dress – "Muriel’s Wedding", 1994. Image by by Robert McFarlane.

It features 275 images, predominantly drawn from the NFSA’s collection, including portraits of Australian actors such as Hugo Weaving, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Toni Collette and Cate Blanchett, and photography from films like Australia, Moulin Rouge!, RED DOG and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Visitors can visit Starstruck.gov.au to preview the exhibition, buy tickets and explore events associated with the exhibition.

Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits will tour to venues in South Australia, regional New South Wales and Queensland.

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November

Sydney: The exhibition delves into the State Library of NSW's vast collection of two million images, showcasing 400 photos – many displayed for the first time.

February

Melbourne: Jill Orr’s The Promised Land Refigured is an exhibition that reworks the original project created in 2012 with new insights that have emerged in the past eleven years.

March

Melbourne: Environmental Futures features five artists whose work addresses how the natural world is affected by climate change and encompasses photography, sculpture and installation both within the gallery spaces and around the museum grounds.

Ballarat: Nan Goldin is an American artist whose work explores subcultures, moments of intimacy, the impacts of the HIV/AIDS and opioid epidemics on her communities, and photography as a tool for social activism.

Sydney: The Ocean Photographer of the Year Award, run by London based Oceanographic Magazine is in its 4th year and has quickly achieved recognition amongst photographers around the world.

Albury: The National Photography Prize offers a $30,000 acquisitive prize, the $5000 John and Margaret Baker Fellowship for an emerging practitioner, and further supports a number of artists through focused acquisitions.

April

The City Surveyor’s ‘Condemnation and Demolition Books’ is a key photographic collection held in the City Archives comprising almost 5000 photographs and associated glass plate negatives.

Sydney: The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new body of work, The Liquid Night, derive from work the highly acclaimed artist shot on 35mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989.

May

Ballarat: Art Gallery of Ballarat presents Lost in Palm Springs, a multidisciplinary exhibition that brings together fourteen creative minds who respond to, capture, or re-imagine the magical qualities of the landscape and the celebrated mid-century modern architecture of Palm Springs, California and across Australia.