We are incredibly excited to announce that ANNE ZAHALKA's seminal photograph, 'Bathers from Bondi: Playground of the Pacific' (1989), is featured in a new release of Australia Post stamps, alongside historic moments captured by the incredible Mervyn Bishop and the late David Moore.
Congratulations ANNE ZAHALKA on this outstanding achievement.
The stamps are now available online at Australia Post. Find them here.
ANNE ZAHALKA’S ZAHALKAWORLD - an artist's archive will be opening at Tweed Regional Gallery this Friday 21 February! Please join me should you be flying through the area. Exhibition runs through to 17 May.
"ZAHALKAWORLD – an artist’s archive brings together key bodies of work that span Zahalka’s practice, presented alongside collected treasures from her archive that inform and inspire her. Encompassing material that is both personal and professional, intellectual and physical, these archival components are incorporated into a recreation of her house-studio within the gallery space.
Imaginative, immersive and playful, this major survey exhibition invites audiences into the artist’s working life and her creative process to explore the illusionary worlds for which she is renowned."
Curated by Anouska Phizacklea, MAPh Director. A Museum of Australian Photography travelling exhibition.
ANNE ZAHALKA's video work features in 'Elemental', an upcoming video art screening in Hobart, at the Salamanca Arts Centre on the 4th Dec. Curated by Sarah Rhodes, it brings together 9 artists - Anne Zahalka, David Stephenson, Izabela Pluta, Troy Ruffels, Ellen Dahl, Dave Carswell, David Noonan, Martyn Jolly, and Sarah Rhodes.
'Elemental' explores our deep connection with the natural world. Each film draws on the elements - rock, air, water and fire - as mediators between person and place. These elements are in a continual dialogue with us, revealing how the environment shapes who we are and how we live within it.
ANNE ZAHALKA's exhibition Fragments of Wildlife is currently on display for the European Month of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia, presented at the Kunsthalle, Dom Umenia – a striking Brutalist building that provides an unexpected backdrop for contemporary photography.
The European Month of Photography, directed by Vaclav Macek, has been running for 35 years and the exhibition features an array of Zahalka's iconic photo-media works from her series Future Past Present Tense (2024) in a stunning large scale. Fragments of Wildlife is on display until the 30th of November 2025.
ANNE ZAHALKA & PAT BRASSINGTON are featured in On Display: The story of Artbank - a landmark publication which chronicles the evolution of Artbank as one of Australia’s most visible and visionary art collections and its role in shaping the national cultural landscape since 1980.
Among the iconic works held in the collection are Anne Zahalka’s The Bather and The Surfers (1989), part of her celebrated series Bondi: Playground of the Pacific. With a critical lens on place, identity and representation, Zahalka reimagines Australian culture through staged portraits set against a painted backdrop of Bondi.
Also, featured in the publication is Pat Brassington's 'Lisp', 1997, which displays a child's face emerges from a watery space as if caught in a dream, speaking to her exploration of digital manipulation and the performativity of the photographic medium.
ANNE ZAHALKA features in the exhibition 'Yield' opening at Moreton Bay Gallery on Sep 20. Inspired by Joseph Bancroft a physician and scientist who migrated from England to Brisbane in 1864 the exhibition interrogates the methods used by colonial scientists, the knowledge they employed and the knowledge ignored to consider how we have arrived at our current environmental state.
📅 20 Sep 2025 - 14 Mar 2026
📍 Caboolture Regional Art Gallery
IMAGE: ANNE ZAHALKA, Farming for the future, 2024, Solvent ink on rag paper, Edition of 5 + A/P, 1/5, Original sources: Australian Museum Archives and Farmers for Climate Action, 100 x 135 cm.
Congratulations to ANNE ZAHALKA for being selected as a finalist in the 2025 Olive Cotton Award!
The Olive Cotton Award is a $20,000 biennial national award for excellence in photographic portraiture in memory of photographer Olive Cotton. In 2025 the Gallery will celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the award.
Like a window into another world, we see what the artist sees. 'Portrait of Riste Andrievski, Mt Keira' features a framed photograph by Riste Andrievski, a Macedonian Australian artist living in the Illawarra. With strong European roots, he struggles to connect with the Australian landscape but is slowly beginning to bond with the bushland.
📅 Exhibition continues until 2 November
📍 Tweed Regional Gallery, NSW
IMAGE: ANNE ZAHALKA, Portrait of Riste Andrievski, Mt Keira, 2025, Solvent ink on rag paper, 103cm x 84cm.
ANNE ZAHALKA
La Gacilly Baden Photo Festival - Austria 📸
Anne Zahalka's exhibition 'Fragments of Wild Life' opened at La Gacilly Baden Photo Festival in Austria is now open!
The festival extends over 7 kilometers, divided into a garden and city route, starting from the visitor center at Brusattiplatz. This year, around 1,500 photographs can be seen in public spaces, some of which are up to 200m² in size. It is the largest outdoor photography festival in Europe, with over 320,491 visitors attending in 2024.
Exhibition continues until 12 Oct
More information >
Anne Zahalka and Julie Rrap's iconic works are currently on display in 'Collecting the Future', now showing at Griffith University Art Museum.
This exhibition celebrates the Griffith University Art Collection through powerful works of feminist self-representation and photographic performance.
More information can be found here.
Nike Savvas and Anne Zahalka are featured in the 'first decade' the exhibition 'A Fictional Retrospective' at Gertrude Contemporary.
Curated by Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon, shaping a fresh and vital interpretation of the late 80s and early 90s in Australian art, the exhibition will evoke the liveliness of the Gertrude community during these foundational years. This is the first iteration of Past is Prologue, a year-long program marking and reflecting on forty years of Gertrude.
A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude's First Decade
📅 8 February - 23 March
📍 Gertrude Contemporary
Anne Zahalka's Forget me not (2024) is a finalist in the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, currently on display at Meroogal in Nowra, NSW.
This album, its frontispiece emblazoned with the words ‘Forget me not’, is usually stored in a sideboard at Meroogal. The pages in the album were once occupied by family photographs. These now vacant pages represent the missing people who lived in the house. Their absence now haunts our encounter, and we can only imagine the portraits this Victorian-era album once held. Displaying this ‘hidden’ collection item as an artwork draws attention to the power of objects to invoke memory and imagination.
The Meroogal Women’s Art Prize is a regional, non-acquisitive competition and exhibition. Women artists from across NSW were invited to submit works, in any medium, that respond to the historic house of Meroogal, its former occupants, and its meaning within broader historical and contemporary contexts.
Visit Forget me not at Meroogal, until the exhibition closes on 24 May 2025.
More information >
Nike Savvas and Anne Zahalka are included in the 'first decade' the exhibition 'A Fictional Retrospective' opening tonight at Gertrude Contemporary.
Curated by Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon, shaping a fresh and vital interpretation of the late 80s and early 90s in Australian art, the exhibition will evoke the liveliness of the Gertrude community during these foundational years. This is the first iteration of Past is Prologue, a year-long program marking and reflecting on forty years of Gertrude.
The exhibition runs until 23 March.
Nike Savvas, Nice Bubbles (detail), 1994, installation view, A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade 1985–1995, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm Melbourne, 2025, iridescent blown glass, image courtesy of the artist and Arc One Gallery, Naarm Melbourne © the artist, photograph: Christian Capurro
Anne Zahalka
Return of the Thylacine, 2024
30cm x 40cm
Clifton Contemporary Art Fair 2025
ANNE ZAHALKA features in Escarpment - Living on the Edge, an exhibition curated by Sheona White to raise much needed funds for the expansion project of the Clifton Art School.
Clifton School of Arts is a unique Victorian landmark with spectacular ocean views. Clifton School of Arts is a historic building, superbly positioned just south of the iconic Sea Cliff Bridge in Clifton New South Wales. This much-loved institution has served the local community as a cultural and events facility for over 110 years.
General public free
Open daily 10am - 4pm
More information >
Celebrating the launch of Mordant Collection Highlights, a publication devoted to the collection of Simon and Catriona Mordant.
"We never set out to build a collection. What has driven us is a passion to be surrounded by creative people, whether in the visual or performing arts. We have only purchased a work when it evoked a reaction in us ... We have never bought a work for a particular wall or because someone told us the artist was important. We have loved this journey together."—Simon and Catriona Mordant
Featured in the highlights are these pieces by Dani Marti, Anne Zahalka, Janet Laurence and John Young.
BOOK NOW: The Artist is Present
During Anne Zahalka's exhibition ZAHALKAWORLD: an artist’s archive, now running at the National Art School, Sydney, there is a special opportunity for small groups of gallery visitors (individual bookings possible) to speak with the artist directly and find out more about her work.
Zahalka will join the 15 minute sessions remotely from her studio in Newtown, Sydney, while visitors will be able to connect with her from inside her ZAHALKAWORLD kunstkammer studio at NAS. Come prepared with questions!
Bookings are essential. Head to the National Art School website to secure your session. Maximum group size of 5 people per session.
The Artist is Present: ZAHALKAWORLD – An artist’s archive
📅 Thursday 29 August, Thursday 5 September, Thursday 12 September 2024
Bookings essential via the National Art School website
📍National Art School, Sydney
IN CONVERSATION TODAY
This afternoon (Saturday, 17 August 2024, 2PM), join Anouska Phizacklea, Director of the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) in conversation with acclaimed Australian artist Anne Zahalka at the National Art School, Sydney.
Zahalka will discuss the her career spanning four decades, the survey exhibition ZAHALKAWORLD: an artist’s archive and key themes explored within her practice.
IN CONVERSATION: ZAHALKAWORLD – An artist’s archive
📅 17 August 2024, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Bookings essential via the National Art School website
📍National Art School, Sydney
Last night we celebrated the opening of Anne Zahalka's survey exhibition at the National Art School, ZAHALKAWORLD – An artist’s archive. Swipe through to see beautiful images from the opening, which was launched by NAS CEO and Director, Steven Alderton, alongside exhibition curator Anouska Phizacklea.
First presented in Naarm/Melbourne at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) in 2023, this iteration of ZAHALKAWORLD at the National Art School will contain over 100 artworks from 15 different photographic series, including the iconic Resemblance series, Bondi: Playground of the Pacific and the more recent Wild Life series.
Also on display will be the Kunstkammer – a life-size recreation of Zahalka’s house-studio within the gallery space, for which she won the Bowness Prize in 2023. Imaginative, immersive and playful, the installation invites audiences into the artist’s working life and creative process to explore the illusionary worlds for which she is renowned.
Anne Zahalka was in The Age this weekend, talking to journalist Helen Pitt on the eve of ZAHALKAWORLD – An artist’s archive travelling to the National Art School in Sydney:
"At 67, as she prepares for a major survey exhibition at her alma mater, the National Art School (NAS), it is easy to see why one of Australia’s most highly regarded photo-media artists is in a reflective mood. Her work spans more than 40 years and 40 solo shows and is in major international collections. This retrospective assembles more than 100 works from 15 different photographic series, alongside collected ephemera from her studio and archive."
Read the rest of the piece here >
Anne Zahalka is currently featured in the exhibition 'Shifting Ground - Landscape from the Collection' from the Wollongong Art Gallery.
Shifting Ground is an exhibition of over 50 works traversing both traditional and contemporary perspectives of landscape art, including works which present First Nations stories of place, climate change and environmental impacts, the effects of colonisation, settlement and the many approaches artists take to capture different fragments, reflections and narratives within landscapes.
SHIFTING GROUND
📅 23 March - 3 November 2024
📍Wollongong Art Gallery, Corner Kembla & Burelli Sts, Wollongong
IMAGE: Anne Zahalka, You Are On Dharawal Land!, 2020, Archival pigment ink on rag paper, edition of 3 + 1 A/P, 115 x 190 cm
Anne Zahalka is currently featured in the La Gacilly Photo Festival in France. Her Wild Life Australia series used the artificial space of museum dioramas to explore the constructed quality of the past (and the future).
Since 2004, the La Gacilly Photo Festival has been defined by its unique geographical setting at the heart of the rural environment in Brittany, and by its commitment to the great environmental challenges facing society. Zahalka's work is included alongside Louise Johns, Bobbi Lockyer, Matthew Abbott, Adam Ferguson, Narelle Autio, Trent Parke, Tamara Dean and more.
LA GACILLY PHOTO FESTIVAL
📅 21 June - 3 November
📍La Gacilly, La Chapelle-Gaceline, France
