Originally produced by the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, in collaboration with and first presented at the San Marco Art Centre in Venice in 2025, this expanded exhibition brings together photographs, models, original drawings, and artworks to trace Seidler’s extraordinary journey.

Forced to flee Nazi-occupied Vienna as a teenager, Seidler embarked on a path that eventually led him to study in the United States under Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Josef Albers, and then work with Marcel Breuer, and later with Oscar Niemeyer. 

From Sydney, he launched a prolific international career that reshaped the architectural landscape of modern Australia. Over five decades, Seidler produced a body of work spanning continents and scales, including significant collaborations with structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and architect Marcel Breuer.

With Penelope Seidler, his life companion and professional partner, he maintained a deep commitment to the relationship between architecture and art. Together they commissioned major artworks for his buildings and assembled a remarkable personal collection featuring works by Alexander Calder, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt.

Across Australia and abroad – from Acapulco, to Paris, Hong Kong, and his native Vienna – Seidler’s legacy emerges as both a personal story and a global narrative that reveals how modernist ideas migrated, evolved, and left a lasting imprint across cultures and time.

‘Fibre’ takes many forms across contemporary and historic weaving, bark, textile, and paper works by First Nations women artists represented in the Chau Chak Wing Museum collection.

Fibre Optics celebrates the ingenuity, technical mastery and enduring depth of women’s knowledge woven into fibre works in all their forms, the title itself a playful nod to the rich visual language of fibre and the material transformation of texture, scale and style.

While Fibre Optics revels in the optics of fibre, it also honours the histories, cultural traditions and labour-intensive processes that produced them, recognising the results of women’s fibre practices not solely as women’s craftwork, but as the masterworks of women artists.

Exhibited artworks span three distinct regions: Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait), Queensland, and  Boggabilla, New South Wales, brought together for the first time.

The emergence of Chinese contemporary art in the late twentieth century, coincided in 1976 with the death of Chairman Mao and the arrest of the “Gang of Four” an infamous political faction within the Chinese Communist Party. A new creative landscape based on an expanded freedom of expression, made way for radical ideas and trailblazing voices.

This exhibition presents the work of six artists: Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, Shen Shaomin, Yang Fudong and Yang Zhichao, whose early years were shaped by monumental upheavals and whose work ultimately achieved great prominence on the world stage. They experienced Mao’s ill-fated campaign to transform China’s agricultural economy into a modern industrialised society (The Great Leap Forward 1958–1962); they lived through the excesses and purges of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) emerging as artists during a period characterised by reform and innovation.

Today their work is considered pioneering and representative of a significant moment in Chinese modern history.

Dr Gene Sherman AM, together with her late husband Brian Sherman AM, played a similarly transformative role within the Australian contemporary landscape through their avant-garde cultural initiatives: Sherman Galleries (1986–2007), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF, 2008–2017), and Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas (SCCI, 2018–2022). These initiatives - operating at the vanguard of contemporary art, design, fashion, and architecture - engaged with China and China Diaspora creatives, from the late 1980s, fostering a community of practitioners whilst serving as a cornerstone of a substantial collection.

Over the course of her four-decades long career, photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960) has produced numerous photographic series and has directed and written many experimental films and videos – all which have helped solidify her reputation as Australia’s most internationally recognised visual artist. She has held dozens of solo exhibitions and has been included in innumerable group exhibitions in countries worldwide.

Career highlights include her films Nightcries – A Rural Tragedy (1989) and BeDevil (1993) were screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2012, she was the first Australian artist to be honoured with a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art New York. In 2017 Tracey represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. In 2021–2022 a series of her photographs were on display at the TATE Modern, London.

The Chau Chak Wing Museum is the recipient of a significant gift of Tracey Moffatt’s artworks, which comprises an edition of every photographic work and every film/video produced since 1985. The Tracey Moffatt Archive also contains ephemera, also known as her “time capsules”, inspired by Andy Warhol, including test prints and idea sketches, personal photographs and correspondence. This is the first collection and archive of its kind donated to an Australian museum.

This project has been produced in collaboration with Tracey Moffatt, who has generously provided complete access to her archive. Shown here, is a tiny percentage of an archive that spans decades, providing insight into the heart and mind of this imaginative and prolific artist.