Major Margaret Preston retrospective at NGV Australia explores First Nations art influences

MELBOURNE — The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia has launched a significant new exhibition dedicated to the life and legacy of Margaret Preston, marking the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in more than 20 years. The exhibition, which opened on Friday, 4 September 2026, features over 200 works and examines Preston’s pivotal role in attempting to define a unique Australian aesthetic. Curated by Michael Gentle, the NGV’s former curator of Australian and First Nations art, and Beckett Rozentals, the gallery’s senior curator of Australian art, the show includes three long-lost paintings recently recovered through a public appeal. The collection showcases Preston’s famous still lifes of native flora, including eucalyptus and banksias, alongside works that demonstrate her deep, though often contested, engagement with Indigenous art forms. According to Michael Gentle, Preston was focused on creating a "unified art for Australia." The exhibition highlights how her vocal admiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art was highly unusual for her era, a time when such works were often dismissed or treated merely as curiosities for tourists. While modern perspectives allow for a critical look at her methods of appropriation, the NGV exhibition acknowledges her early efforts to center Indigenous artistic traditions within the national identity. Born in Port Adelaide in 1875, Preston became a prominent figure in the Australian modernist movement. The retrospective takes a loosely chronological approach, displaying her evolution from classical naturalism to the blocky, modernist styles influenced by both European cubism and the flattened forms of Japanese woodblock prints. The NGV Australia exhibition serves as a platform to discuss how Preston’s fascination with Indigeneity helped shape the early 20th-century art landscape in Australia.