MCA Australia opens Primavera 2025: Young Australia Artists

5 September 2025, Sydney

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) today opened Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists. Now in its 34th year, Primavera continues to be a vital platform for showcasing the work of Australian artists aged 35 and under.

Primavera 2025, curated by the MCA’s Tim Riley Walsh, brings together five early-career Australian artists whose work reimagines the language of production through a sculptural lens. The exhibition tells powerful stories of labour, technology, and transformation. Collectively these artists consider what it means to make art in a digital and post-industrial era.

The exhibition features ambitious new and recent works by Francis Carmody (VIC/NSW), Alexandra Peters (VIC), Augusta Vinall Richardson (VIC), Keemon Williams (QLD) and Emmaline Zanelli (SA).

Primavera 2025 artists (left to right): Alexandra Peters (VIC), Francis Carmody (VIC/NSW), Keemon Williams (QLD), Augusta Vinall Richardson (VIC) and Emmaline Zanelli (SA).

From boomerangs to birdcages, bronze to corten steel, video to enamel paint, the five Primavera artists for 2025 work in diverse mediums. Their works open up new ways of thinking about the contested relationship between human creativity and machines, as well as reflect on the pressures on artists as people in the contemporary world.

“The Primavera 2025 artists reflect the future of making in this country. They are the voices of a new generation and demonstrate the vitality of emerging contemporary Australian art,” said curator Tim Riley Walsh. “Over the course of close to 50 studio visits across the country, I observed intriguing shifts in how young practitioners are responding to a rapidly changing technological landscape. This exhibition is a response to those shifts and foregrounds especially the powerful innovations in sculptural and installation-based practice in Australia.”

Since its inception, Primavera has presented the work of over 250 artists and 30 curators, playing a pivotal role in launching the careers of many of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.

About the Primavera 2025 artists and their works:

Francis Carmody
Born 1998, Gadigal Country/Sydney. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne

Francis Carmody thinks of his practice as a form of speculative storytelling. He considers the social structures that underpin our current reality to understand our past and to imagine possible futures. Carmody’s work spans mediums, with a recent focus on sculptural work, and engages collaborators with expertise across diverse disciplines to investigate historical and natural phenomena.

Presenting two new sculptural pieces, Canine Trap I and II (both 2025), Carmody demonstrates his innovative artistic methodology which combines digital processes like 3D modelling with a unique application of experimental materials such as electroplated graphite and salt crystal crusts. Carmody’s works illustrate his curious, conceptual enquiries into speculative scenarios from the planet’s past and future. In the sculptures Carmody examines histories of ensnarement and trap making as metaphors for what he sees as the predatory nature of capitalism.

Alexandra Peters
Born 1990, Warrnambool. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne

Alexandra Peters is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work spans painting, print, sculpture and assemblage, often taking the form of large-scale installations.

For Primavera 2025, Peters exhibits The Infinite Image (2025), a single installation comprised of six individual works that collectively challenge expectations of ‘typical’ painting and print-making practices. Blurring the lines between genres, Peters transforms the MCA Australia galleries into what the artist calls a ‘staging’, turning the space into a corporate environment where artistic interventions into the museum’s architecture cut open its walls (Shell Corporation, 2025) and reframe its floor-to-ceiling windows in the artist’s chosen grey-green enamel (Fenestration (Autoantibodies), 2025).

Augusta Vinall Richardson
Born 1991, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne

Augusta Vinall Richardson makes abstract composite sculptures out of sheet and cast metals, employing industrial materials and processes in a practice underpinned by an ethics of responsibility for objects. Her works recall legacies of minimalism but celebrate irregularities and imperfections, investing especially in textural qualities. Her process begins with hand drawings or the building of cardboard and papier-mâché maquettes.

Presenting her largest work to date, Vinall Richardson’s new sculptural pair, Arrangement of forms (apparition) I and II (both 2025), continues her distinctive language which combines stacked modular prisms fabricated by hand by the artist from cut sheet metal; in this instance prized bronze and the utilitarian corten steel. Vinall Richardson’s sculptures celebrate the visual language and history of geometric abstraction, while also subtly unpicking geometry’s associations with permanence and order.

Keemon Williams
Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam, and South Sea Islander peoples. Born 1999, Gimuy/Cairns. Lives and works Magandjin/Brisbane

Keemon Williams is a Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Meriam Mir and South Sea Islander artist and curator based in Magandjin/Brisbane. His practice considers queer, Indigenous and Australian experiences as lived in the shadow of colonisation. His work often draws on the language of production, as well as memory and humour.

In previous works Williams has interrogated the appropriation of cultural objects such as boomerangs by the tourist industry. For Primavera 2025, the artist expands the scope of this body of work to examine the demands of the art industry placed on cultural practitioners. Pushing this to an absurd level, Williams has outsourced the production of 999 aluminium boomerangs to an off-shore manufacturer in a conceptual gesture reflecting the ‘unsustainable’ pressures of the art market, displayed in the gallery as teetering towers that recall a cityscape or rolls of coins, accompanied by a vast wall work that recalls corporate modelling

Emmaline Zanelli
Born 1994, Tarndanya/Adelaide. Lives and works Tarndanya/Adelaide

Emmaline Zanelli’s work combines elements of video, photography, sculpture and performance. Influenced by absurdism and surrealism, she creates art that seeks humour and meaning in the everyday. Recently, her work has considered themes of labour and youth culture.

For Primavera 2025 Zanelli presents two recent and closely related artworks together for the first time: the two-channel video I take care of what’s mine (2023-24) and the installation Magic Cave (2024), with the former created by the artist in collaboration with the young people of Roxby Downs, a regional South Australian town home predominantly to miners who work in the neighbouring Olympic Dam mine. The film and installation visualise the subterranean spaces of the mine, depicting them as fantastical realms home to strange beasts.

About the curator

Primavera 2025 Curator, Tim Riley Walsh, is Assistant Curator at the MCA Australia. Previously, he was Curator in Residence, Gertrude, Naarm/Melbourne, and held roles at Camden Art Centre, London and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Magandjin/Brisbane. Riley Walsh’s MCA Australia curatorial projects include Data Dreams: Art and AI (2025, co-curator), MCA Collection: Artists in Focus (2025, curatorium) and supporting the presentations of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine (2024) and Tarek Atoui: Waters’ Witness (2023–24). Outside of the MCA, his recent external projects include Unbecoming, La Trobe Art Institute, Djaara/Bendigo (2025) and You Are Here Too, Institute of Modern Art, Magandjin/Brisbane (co-curator, 2025).

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists in on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Level 2, from 5 September 2025 to 8 March 2026.

About Primavera

Primavera is the MCA’s annual exhibition of young Australian artists aged 35 and under. Since 1992, the Primavera series has showcased the works of artists and curators in the early stages of their career. Former Primavera artists, including Mikala Dwyer, Shaun Gladwell, Danie Mellor, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Taloi Havini and Abdul Abdullah, have gone on to exhibit nationally and internationally. Primavera was initiated in 1992 by Dr Edward Jackson AM, Mrs Cynthia Jackson AM and their family in memory of their daughter and sister Belinda, a talented jeweller who died at the age of 29.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.