What would a genuine artistic response to motherhood look like if we stripped away sentimentality? The National Gallery of Victoria is about to answer that question with sweeping ambition. MOTHER: Stories from the NGV Collection opens in March as the most comprehensive thematic exhibition exploring motherhood ever mounted in an Australian art institution, and the scale of ambition matters less than what the curators have chosen to include.
Running from 27 March to 12 July 2026 at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works that refuse easy categorisation. Rather than fetishising motherhood as sacred or, conversely, reducing it to biological function, the exhibition treats it as an infinitely complex human experience that has preoccupied artists for centuries.
From the walls of caves to ancient Egyptian tombs and Renaissance frescoes, the depiction of mother and child has endured across cultures. Yet what changes across time is everything else. The exhibition unpacks both universal and culturally specific experiences of motherhood, such as transformation and joy; societal expectations and invisible labour; mythology and religious iconography; as well as the deep connection between motherhood, nature and Country for First Nations communities.
The breadth of artistic voices is striking. The exhibition features works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Camille Henrot, David Hockney, Tracey Moffat, Iluwanti Ken, Patricia Piccinini, and Rembrandt van Rijn, alongside contemporary Australian practitioners. This isn't a survey that privileges European old masters; it deliberately positions them in conversation with artists whose perspectives have historically been marginalised.
Consider what the gallery has chosen to make central. Ruth O'Leary's work was created by transforming the black and white photobooth at Flinders Street station into a makeshift studio after the birth of her first child. O'Leary could no longer stage traditional, equipment-heavy photoshoots, so she took her baby, costumes and backdrops to a public photobooth. The works from this series mark a turning point in O'Leary's practice, where motherhood and artmaking are no longer in conflict, but rather, in dialogue. This speaks to something real: the practical friction between creative labour and reproductive labour that has shaped countless artists' lives.
Or take Hayley Millar Baker's moving image work Entr'acte, 2023, which honours the monumental strength, focus and determination of Indigenous women as matriarchs. The film features curator Clothilde Bullen as a representative for the weight of expectation and demands that exist for First Nations women in contemporary society. This isn't gentle; it names structural pressures.
The exhibition features works by contemporary and historical Australian and First Nations artists, alongside international art. It explores both universal and culturally specific experiences of motherhood, from private transformation and societal expectation to intergenerational trauma and loss, mythology and religious iconography, storytelling and language and the deep connection between motherhood, nature and Country.
The thematic scope is deliberately unsentimental. Loss, grief, invisible labour and societal constraint appear alongside joy and transformation. The exhibition looks to bridge past and future through artworks depicting the knowledge exchange between mother and child, as well as artists paying tribute to their own mothers. It treats motherhood not as a fixed category but as a lived, contested, evolving human condition.
Entry is free, making the exhibition accessible beyond gallery members. For those seeking art that respects the intelligence of its audience and refuses easy answers, the breadth of this collection offers something substantive. That the NGV has chosen to mount such a comprehensive examination of a subject usually confined to sentimental cliché suggests the institution understands something vital: art's role is not to flatter our existing assumptions, but to expand them. Visit the exhibition page for details and curatorial notes.