Ignite a child's natural curiosity when you visit. Discover a wonderful menagerie of animals, some easy to spot; others waiting to be found. Did you know there's a shark living in the art gallery? Find our playful pigs, go bird watching, or keep an eye out for a pack of polar bears!
From the earliest paintings to today's contemporary works, animals have featured in art. Go on a self-guided animal art trail with us at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).
Both our buildings are nestled beside the Brisbane River and are just a short stroll from each other, we're also close to South Bank Parklands to extend your day even further.
ANOTHER SELF-GUIDED ANIMAL ART TRAIL: Great and Small: Kindred Creatures in Indigenous Australian Art
Watch out for the shark!
Start your self-guided animal art trail
In this selection of animals — from the two-legged, the four-legged, to the many legged kind — you'll find QAGOMA has them all in painting, sculpture, jewellery, and decorative objects. How many more can you find?
Queensland Art Gallery
Find two mice who love art
Roy and Matilda are two mice who love art galleries. When visiting one day, they set about making a cosy home. A man who worked in the Galley restoring and carving frames found they were living here and decided to make them a special monogrammed front door. See if the're home when you visit.
Location: Gallery 11. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Fifteen dancing brolgas... can you count them all?
Brolgas are known for their intricate dance and trumpeting sound. This painting shows people and birds united by music.
Nearby: Find the Australian Kelpie and the shark.
Location: Gallery 11. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Find the restful Australian Kelpie
Locate our celestial shark
Spot our white dove
Birds regularly appear in paintings. As a child this artist was a frequent visitor to Sydney’s Taronga Park Zoo and developed a lifelong love of animals and the natural world.
Location: Gallery 12. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Can you locate all the camel pieces?
This work is playful and witty, the segmented 'Jumble Animals' take inspiration from the back of Kellogg’s breakfast cereal boxes which were designed to be cut out and reassembled by children, like a jigsaw. In this version, it's a little harder as you have to piece it together in your mind.
Location: Gallery 13. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Pick out the four goannas
This painting is from one of the traditional Indigenous Australian dreaming stories, and this work shows four goanna's moving towards a waterhole. The work has a strong sense of symmetry, one half is a mirror image of the other.
Location: Gallery 13. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Go bird watching
Head back down the Gallery on the way to the International Art Collection and find all the native animals carved into the sideboard, then drop by our Red-tailed Black Cockatoos.
Location: Gallery 10. Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Search for all the birds, we count 10
This screen of birds depicts change by including all four seasons within a singular landscape — from a snowy winter scene to the blooms of spring. How many birds can you find?
Nearby: Find a little green caterpiller
Location: Gallery 7. International Art Collection, Philip Bacon Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery
Track down the green caterpillar
Watch out for the flying dragonfly
The shapes and rhythms of nature inspired the style Art Nouveau. Find our collection of glass vases featuring delicately frosted animal and insects; and jewellery that take the form of a dragonfly brooch, and a comb featuring a ladybird sitting on a leaf.
Location: Gallery 7. International Art Collection, Philip Bacon Galleries, Queensland Art Gallery.
Find the lucky ladybird beetle
Discover four pigs relaxing at home
This is definitely one of the cutest little homes you will see, substituting animals for people, with one relaxing on a couch, the others playing ball in the backyard swimming pool. Look closely at all the details from the heart shaped cushions to the white swan, green frog, and garden gnome.
Nearby: Check out the housebound tortoise who appears to carry the weight of the world on his back; the sleeping baby being cared for by a tree full of animals; and the squad of ten pink roaming polar bears.
Location: Pelican Lounge. Queensland Art Gallery
Find our housebound tortoise
How many animals can you see in the tree?
Discover our squad of pink polar bears
Visit our local water dragons
The Gallery’s Watermall extends far beyond the Gallery’s interior, past the Dandelion fountains through to the reflection pond and Sculpture Courtyard. Visit the adjoining QAG Cafe and keep an eye out for our resident water dragons, Australia’s largest dragon lizard. Native to eastern Australia, they have a life span of around 20 years, though they can grow up to a metre in length, thankfully our contented residents aren’t that big. They are especially adapted to an aquatic life, and if you’re lucky you can watch them dive into the pond from the overhanging Tipuana tree and swim off using their powerful long tail.
Location: QAG Cafe. Watermall, Queensland Art Gallery
Gallery of Modern Art
Hermannsburg Pottery
In the sweeping plains and red-hued rolling ranges of the Central Desert in Northern Territory lies Ntaria (Hermannsburg). Here, a dedicated group of artists have pioneered pottery that has a distinctive style of hand-coiled clay vessels, often adorned with animals and matching...
‘Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography’ explores how artists have used the medium to interpret the Australian suburbs, the exhibition brings together works that pause to reflect on everyday settings, places, and people, imbuing them with aesthetic, historical, and emotional significance.
While rationales for capturing ‘suburbia’ vary, the artworks in ‘Suburban Sublime’ consistently demonstrate the enduring role of photography in enriching the national understanding of familiar scenes and images from everyday life.
Bill Henson Untitled #73 1985-86
Often recognised for embodying the concept of ‘suburban sublime’ in his practice, Bill Henson is one of the most celebrated photographers working today. In the mid-1980s series ‘Untitled 1985/86’ (illustrated), he treats the service stations, restaurants and people of suburbia with a sensitivity that is normally reserved for places of worship, or historically significant architecture. Many of the photographs appear to be taken at dusk, with Henson drawing on his command of colour and light to create monumental images that are influenced by Baroque sensibilities. Reflecting on the series, Henson has said:
I realised that it wasn’t the landscapes I was interested in but the dreamscapes: the way people carry their past and their childhood around inside of them . . . Suddenly I could look at it as an imaginary landscape rather than a realistic one.
Despite the familiarity of his content, Henson’s calculated framing allows the emotion and subjectivity of a scene to supersede any sense of location and context. Often favouring such ambiguities, he imbues his images with a universal and timeless quality.
Robert Rooney Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970
In contrast to Henson’s drama, Robert Rooney depicts the suburbs in a mechanical, serialised manner. He documented Melbourne’s suburbs in 1970 with his first major photographic artwork War Savings Streets, which contained a poster displaying a grid of 60 photographs mapping the streets involved in donations programs during World War Two. His approach was influenced by North American artist Ed Ruscha, who Rooney has described as treating his camera like a ‘technical recorder’. While shooting War Savings Streets, Rooney noticed the continual presence of the vehicle he was using, a Holden FJ belonging to his friend, musician Barry McKimm, in the photographs. He subsequently created Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970 (illustrated), showing McKimm’s car parked in various streets, with the locations chosen through a pre-determined system of placing a transparent sheet with dots over a street directory. Photography as a medium lends itself to repetition; Rooney’s ritualised process foregrounded its importance to the development of conceptual art.
Photography thrived in Australia in the 1970s, with the decade seeing increased institutional support for the medium and artists using it to document the socio-politics of the era. Melbourne photographer Carol Jerrems worked among the anti-establishment counterculture of the day, with her practice geared towards feminism and optimistic social change. Her most famous photograph, Vale Street 1975, is a portrait of then aspiring actor Catriona Brown and two of Jerrems’s former students, teenagers Mark Lean and Jon Bourke. Standing in a St Kilda backyard, Brown assuredly occupies the foreground, flanked by Lean and Bourke, who eerily hover behind her. In 1999, Brown explained how Jerrems framed the image: ‘[Jerrems] chose the boys being angry, cunning and watching carefully, guarding themselves against my openness, directness and honesty . . . She was a great observer of people’.Enduringly compelling, Vale Street has become a defining image of the 1970s.
Tracey Moffatt Picturesque Cherbourg no.1 2013
Tracey Moffatt’s 2013 ‘Picturesque Cherbourg’ series (illustrated) uses landscape imagery to address highly personal human experiences. On first glance, nothing seems out of the ordinary in these bright snapshots of suburban Queensland streets. However, a closer viewing reveals deep tear lines through the photographs — which, even after being pasted back together, remain fractured, even ruptured. The town of Cherbourg was established as a mission in 1901 and later became a government settlement, where many Indigenous peoples were sent to live after being forcibly removed from Country. Describing the trauma of her family members who lived at the Cherbourg settlement, Moffatt has said, ‘The old people don’t want to talk about it, like war veterans’. Moffatt’s use of ‘sun-saturated colour’ conveys Cherbourg’s ‘complex fabric of pain and getting-on-with-it resilience’. Contextualising these picture-perfect images with violent tears, Moffatt reminds us of the psychological burden of historical realities that are often hidden behind seemingly pleasant exteriors.
Across two rotations, the photographs in ‘Suburban Sublime’ demonstrate the artistic potential of familiar places and moments that might otherwise be overlooked in the rhythms of daily life. Despite the varied origins and subjects, the works encourage us to look more closely at the everyday and the places we inhabit.
Glen O’Malley Good Friday 1987, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane… 1987
William Yang Me and Alan, living room. Graceville. 1986 2003
Grace Jeremy is Assistant Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA
Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography
10 August 2024 – 17 August 2025
Henry and Amanda Bartlett Galleries (Gallery 6)
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
Free entry