20 June – 23 August 2026
In the Company of Animals: Animals in the MPRG Collection brings together works from across the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s Permanent Collection to explore how animals have been represented in Australian art over almost two centuries. Spanning three gallery spaces and tracing works chronologically from 1825 to 2024, the exhibition shows shifting artistic approaches to the animal as subject, symbol, companion, and metaphor.
Across painting, printmaking, drawing and mixed media, animals appear in many forms: carefully observed studies of the natural world, dreamlike and psychological presences, emblems of memory and identity, and stand-ins for human emotion and experience. In many cases, they act as agents of exchange — figures through which human identity is tested, projected, and understood. Sometimes central to the image and sometimes quietly embedded within it, different animals move across these artistic languages and historical periods.
Together, these works reveal the animal not as a fixed subject, but as a rich and adaptable visual language capable of carrying humour, vulnerability, fear, intimacy, nostalgia, and power. Moving through early colonial encounters, First Nations people’s relationship with animal life and Country, and into contemporary practice, In the Company of Animals considers how artists have continually returned to animals as part of an ongoing dialogue — a way of thinking through what it means to be human.
This exhibition extends the dialogue with Helen Britton’s The Story So Far exhibition in the main space, where animals appear as anchoring figures of home, memory, and self. Across both exhibitions, the animal functions as a point of return — a way of locating identity through material, place, memory, and lived experience, while also opening outward into imagination, transformation, and narrative.
Image Caption: (Detail) Louise Hearman, Untitled #963, 2003, pastel on paper, 25.0 x 21.7cm (Photo: Mark Ashkanasy). Gift of the Friends of the MPRG. Acquired from the artist through the 2004 National Works on Paper exhibition
The exhibition includes the works of Charles Blackman, Brett Whiteley, Pooaraar, Fred Williams, Anne Hall, Katherine Hattam, John Olsen, Les Kossatz, Noel McKenna, Rick Amor, Julia Ciccarone, Jenny Watson and more.
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