The Intelligence of Contemporary Art - Review
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s autumn 2025 season celebrates the diversity of Australian Contemporary Art with two exciting new exhibitions: ‘The Intelligence of Painting’, which features the work of fourteen women artists for whom the paint medium is a vital part of their practice, and Warraba Weatherall’s ‘Shadow and Substance’, the first solo show by the Kamilaroi artist. ‘The Intelligence of Painting’ will run until 20 July 2025, while Weatherall’s work can be viewed until 21 September 2025. These two exhibitions are wildly different – just as the contemporary art scene itself is diverse and unpredictable.
Installation view The Intelligence of Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2025, left to right: Prudence Flint, The Bath, 2022, oil on linen, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2022; Eleanor Louise Butt, Within the Garden (Autumn Painting 2), 2022, oil on cotton, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2023; Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Djulpan, 2021, natural pigments on bark, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2023 © the artists, photograph: Hamish McIntosh | Image courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Stepping into ‘The Intelligence of Painting’, visitors are immersed in an expansive, bright atmosphere that invites them to “look, think, feel and, also, to imagine”. Curators Suzanne Cotter and Manya Sellers have arranged the works evenly, guiding the eye in a seamless flow of colour that snakes around the walls. It feels as though I’ve crossed into a dreamscape. Vivid hues of paint blur and mirror onto the glossy gallery floor, spilling beyond the confines of the canvas. The sheer vibrance of the room creates a challenge for the visitor as each work demands immediate attention. This arrangement is highly effective, prompting us to draw closer with intention.
The exhibition is framed as a set of “overlapping conversations”, with each work offering a distinct voice shaped by its subject, technique, and material. It’s tantalizing to move from the intimacy of Prudence Flint’s The Bath (2022), a voyeuristic, moody nude in salmon-pink, to Eleanor Louise Butt’s abstracted, sweeping brushstrokes of yellow in Within the Garden (Autumn Painting 2) (2022). Art-making, at its core, attempts to transcribe the experience of existence by capturing the energies at force in our world. Karen Black’s surreal, languid figure in blue, The Mountain (2024), embodies this effort, exploring the vibrations of emotion that bleed into our surrounding environments.
‘The Intelligence of Painting’ is a joyous celebration of women contemporary artists. In essence, the exhibition is a series of recollections of life — the figure, family, nature, physical objects—through one shared medium. Each piece showcases a unique approach to artmaking, resulting in a powerful expression of the possibilities of painting. The MCA invites the viewer to uncover not just the technical expertise of the artists, but the deeper cultural and emotional intelligence they have embedded into their works.
Warraba Weatherall, Shadow and Substance, 2025, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © the artist, photograph: Jessica Maurer | Image courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Warraba Weatherall’s ‘Shadow and Substance’ is an urgent inquiry into the impact of colonial documentation, interrogating the way museums and other institutions distort the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. By removing First Nations materials from Country, these objects are reduced to mere cultural curiosities. Warraba exposes the significant misrepresentation in the colonial record, drawing on both real archival sources and his family’s lived experience to serve as an explicit reminder of how harmful research practices have obscured true Indigenous histories.
Curator Megan Robson has facilitated a reflective environment. In the dimly lit room, spotlights punctuate a powerful array of sound, sculpture, video, and written text. Visitors immediately confront the unnerving steel and aluminium sculpture InstitutionaLies (2017/2025). Encased within a craniometer (a tool historically used to justify pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority), sits the world globe, surrounded by numerous pointed spears which encircle and intercept the curved structure. Drawing on the failure of the Royal Commission’s inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the work “places the Western gaze under the scrutiny of First Nations peoples”, reversing the dominant power hierarchy. To the left, a video installation plays on repeat in a dark room. Like something out of a horror film, Dialectic (2025) is jarring and a-tonal, distorting open-source film samples and sound recordings to depict the archive as a site of violence. Warraba creates uncomfortable, haunting representations of Australia’s colonial legacy and its ongoing impact on First Nations peoples.
To know and possess (2021-2025) is an installation of 30 cast bronze plaques that replicate index cards used by Australian museums to record Kamilaroi cultural material. At first glance, the installation appears to be a selection of museum labels, devoid of the objects each plaque is meant to describe. The absence of the items is striking. The cards document a range of materials, including shields, clubs, boomerangs, and human remains. The small rectangles of text have been spread across an entire wall of the exhibition room, creating a visual sense of displacement. There is an overwhelming emptiness to the space that emphasizes the magnitude of what has been taken, serving as a stark reminder of the systemic theft that has spanned generations. Notably, the descriptions on each piece fail to mention its maker or the circumstances of its removal — “a huge amount of violence surrounds these materials”.
Decolonisation of museums is an ongoing effort that rethinks the way museums exhibit and interpret cultural objects and artifacts. Warraba’s work forces us to reconcile with the ongoing impact of collecting practices on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
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Contemporary art is relevant and necessary. Both ‘The Intelligence of Painting’ and Warraba Weatherall’s ‘Shadow and Substance’ solidify this claim, offering two distinct yet equally compelling experiences. ‘The Intelligence of Painting’ produces pure awe and joy. The works are fluid, colourful, and full of energy – a testament to the depth of talent in Australian women artists. In contrast, Weatherall’s ‘Shadow and Substance’ evokes a more somber mood, forcing the viewer to confront the weight of Australia’s colonial history in all its discomfort. Both exhibitions are deeply rooted in personal histories. One catches a glimmer of the fleeting perceptions that define our lives, and the other demands recognition of past injustices that continue to shape our present. I implore both the contemporary art aficionado and anyone who has ever complained about the supposed disintegration of aesthetic standards in the 21st century to visit the MCA this autumn.