Margaret Preston at NGV: Melbourne’s First Major Retrospective in Twenty Years
The first full retrospective of Margaret Preston’s work in more than two decades opens at NGV Australia this September, bringing together over 200 paintings, prints and sculptures from her seven-decade career.
If you’ve ever admired a bold, boldly Australian still life of flannel flowers or gum blossom and wondered who painted it, chances are it was Margaret Preston. From 4 September, NGV Australia is giving her the retrospective she’s overdue, and it’s shaping up to be one of the standout exhibitions on Melbourne’s cultural calendar this spring and summer.
Related reading: How to Make the Most of Your Visit to The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia
About the exhibition
Margaret Preston runs at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Federation Square from 4 September 2026 to 31 January 2027. It’s the first exhibition dedicated to Preston in more than twenty years, and it traces her career from her early 1900s still lifes through to the landscapes and prints she made later in life. Preston was a central figure in the development of modernism in Australia, and this show sets out to prove exactly why.
The show brings together loans from the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of South Australia, alongside works from NGV’s own collection, including two of her best-known paintings, Flannel flowers (1938) and Shoalhaven Gorge, New South Wales (1940–41).
What to look out for
Preston’s still lifes are the heart of the show. Early works such as Still life with teapot (1915) and The teapot cosy (1916) reveal a brighter palette and looser brushwork picked up from her time in Europe, where she encountered the Post-Impressionists. Look, too, for her woodblock prints from the mid-1920s — more than thirty of them are on display, many hand-coloured, depicting native flowers, birds and views across Sydney Harbour.
There’s also a strong body of work from her Berowra years in the 1930s, when she turned her attention to Australian bush flora, and landscapes from the 1940s that came out of her travels to rock art sites across Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.
Alongside Preston’s own work, the exhibition includes nineteen pieces by contemporary First Nations artists responding to her legacy and her use of Indigenous imagery, among them world-premiere commissions by Marilyn Russell and Jimmy Frank Jupurrurla, and work by Tony Albert, Gordon Bennett and Trevor Nickolls. It’s a thoughtful way of putting her work in conversation with today’s artists rather than presenting it in isolation, and it gives the exhibition real depth for anyone interested in how Australian art has grappled with questions of identity and cultural borrowing.
A companion book, edited by curators Beckett Rozentals and Michael Gentle, accompanies the exhibition for anyone who wants to take the research home with them.
Planning your visit
Tickets: This is a ticketed exhibition, separate from NGV’s free permanent collection — admission fees apply, and I’d recommend booking your entry time online in advance through the NGV website, particularly for weekends. Book tickets here.
Quieter times: Weekday mornings tend to be the calmest time to visit any NGV exhibition, with weekends and school holidays busier.
Accessibility: The Ian Potter Centre has street-level entrances with automatic doors, and lift access to every floor (there’s no down escalator, so factor that in if you’re navigating with a pram or trolley as well). Wheelchairs are available for free hire from the Information Desk — it’s worth booking ahead by calling 03 8620 2222. A hearing loop is available in the Theatre. Accessible toilets are on-site.
Getting there
- By tram: Trams along Flinders Street (routes 70, 75 and the City Circle) and along Swanston Street/St Kilda Road (routes 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 16, 64, 67 and 72) all stop near Federation Square — alight at Flinders Street and walk in.
- By train: Flinders Street Station is right next door.
- By car: Parking is available at the Federation Square Car Park (enter from the corner of Flinders and Russell Streets) or the Arts Centre car park beneath NGV International on Sturt Street, Southbank.
Angie’s review
I have long been a fan of Margaret Preston’s work, in particular her woodcuts, so I was very keen to make a day to visit and it was superb.
Margaret Preston was one of the leading Modernists of the early 20th century & also one of the first non-Indigenous Australian artists to use Aboriginal motifs in her work. Her goal was to foster a ‘national art’.
Born in Port Adelaide in 1875, her family moved to Sydney when she was 10. After studying at art school, she returned to Adelaide to teach art to help support herself and after her parents died, she travelled with friends to Europe for some years; rather adventurous and liberal in 1894. Interesting to me was that it was in Paris that she was drawn to the Japanese style of art. She began to reduce her own work to “decoration without ornamentation”. This is the core influence of her printmaking style.
Her woodcuts are printed on tissue paper & hand coloured afterwards so that each print is unique. Not only are her works beautiful pieces of art but of a technical ability than non-artists cannot fathom as well as an historical record of life around Mosman Sydney where she returned to live during her married life.
Her still-life paintings & those of Australian wildflowers will cut to the heart of Australian wildflower fans.
Preston’s art also found it’s way to the covers of women’s magazines and this helped her reach a much larger audience. Please make sure you enter the climate-controlled darkened space off one of the exhibition rooms to see items on loan from The State Library & while you are there, check out the price for an annual subscription – around $200 today?
After the first rooms, we decided to follow the wall around rather than criss-cross each room to complete a time-line. It did mean we viewed some of Margaret Preston’s works in reverse chronological order but it actually refreshed us, enabling us to look back and reflect on her development as an artist.
There are noticeably fewer descriptive art labels than at other exhibitions but as is becoming the norm, QR codes provide more detail & on my morning train trip from Geelong I took time to read some articles on Margaret Preston ahead of time. I’m glad I did.
Finally, one pair of paintings that do have an art label for essential reading are the afternoon tea paintings by Margaret Preston & Thea Proctor. I will not say more!
For those of you unable to attend this exhibition, there is an online session on the 15th October – click below to book. It’s free.
Afterwards we headed off to enjoy an ice-cream at Home – Pidapipó however if you prefer to sit in comfort, a scoop of Baci ice-cream at Brunetti would be my choice.
My friend then headed back to Ian Potter and raved about the Joseph Brown collection. On-going & free entry. Next time for me!
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