Exhibition review: Summer Exhibition 2025, Victorian Arts Society

This reviewer has only been to an opening at the Victorian Arts Society (VAS) once before, and was impressed, not just with the building but by the artists, such as watercolour master Joseph Zbukvić (who has a substantial following in China). So this new exhibition was a must. 

The show takes up the whole upstairs area (the Hammond, Frater and McCubbin Galleries), and the architecture is strikingly colonial-era English. Refined, polite, upper-class lines run throughout the walls, staircase and cornices. The art in this annual exhibition is a melting pot of mediums and a cocktail of genres. Still lifes, landscapes, portraits, mosaics, realist, impressionist, abstract, watercolour, acrylics, oils, gouache, linocut, bronze, ceramic, steel, charcoal, and of course a few ‘mixed media’, which is the industry euphemism for ‘all sorts of stuff’. 

With a show this diverse, favourite pieces will vary enormously from person to person. Among personal favourites would be Anna Xiang’s glowing portrait, Louise Foletta’s multi-panelled landscape, John Rabling’s watercolour image from Japan, Samira Khadivizand’s fluid thought-scape (the only piece in the gallery that jumps the line from abstraction to surrealism) and Linda Weil’s characteristically quirky metallic seahorse. 

However, this exhibition’s sheer diversity is both a strength and a weakness, since there’s nothing conceptually tying the pieces together, no recurring theme for the viewer’s mind to attach to. This diversity also means that, as stated before, everyone will have their own favourites – still life lovers will have a field day, landscape fans will be over the moon and portrait aficionados will be beaming, although fans of abstract or surreal art will be having a bit of a reality overload. 

The winning entries were announced on the opening afternoon. One fundamental point for this writer is that all art, regardless of medium, should do or say something (or both), and the winners didn’t seem to say or do anything that hadn’t been said or done before (although Marija Patterson’s winning sculptures are exquisite).

The winning entries seemed very conservative, traditional, safe. However, perhaps one should be reminded of what VAS is – it was established in 1870 and, according to its promotional flyer, it “continues the traditions of fine art”. With this in mind, this exhibition and its winners are an overwhelming success.

Julian Bruere’s winning painting of an Australian bush landscape is a good example of the traditions being upheld here – technically and aesthetically, it’s a wonderful work, but it’s not really doing or saying anything that wasn’t done and said 150 years ago. But if that doesn’t bother you, this show has a lot to offer. For instance the sculptures by winner Liz Gridley are traditional, but technically incredible.

Read: Theatre review: Wuthering Heights, Roslyn Packer Theatre

If you want something wild and new and strange, go and see the Yayoi Kusama show at the NGV; if you want rooms full of technically brilliant, but more traditional art, go here instead. Or, even better, do both one after the other, because, at the end of the day, all art is subjectively beautiful, and beautifully subjective.

Summer Exhibition 2025 at Victorian Arts Society, 430 Albert Street, East Melbourne, will be on display until 9 February 2025.
Free entry.