Vale: Vivienne Binns

Tue 18 Aug 2026

The Gallery acknowledges the passing of Vivienne Binns in August 2026 and with it, the loss of one of Australia’s most innovative contemporary artists. Born in 1940 in Wyong, New South Wales, Binns studied painting and drawing at the National Art School in Sydney (1958–62). In the 1960s, she was part of a group of young, politically aware Sydney artists who were influenced by Dada and Surrealism and used non-traditional materials, including found objects, to challenge social mores and address sexual inequalities.

In Binns’s groundbreaking debut solo exhibition, at Sydney’s Watters Gallery in 1967, she displayed images of genitalia and paintings with irregular, unfinished surfaces, establishing herself as a leading avant-garde artist in Sydney, and engaging with ideas of gender politics that would set the stage for her later feminist work during the 1970s. One work from this exhibition, Orange flam 1967 (illustrated), contests conventional ideas of painting through its disjointed format and organic designs. Through works like Orange flam, Binns took a playful and defiant dig at contemporary artists, many of them male, working in the more refined, unemotional genre of hard-edge painting.

Orange flam 1967

Binns was a proficient artist across several media, pioneering the expansion of art practice beyond the gallery context by leading community-based projects throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One such project, Mothers’ memories, others’ memories (1979–81) (illustrated), held by Blacktown Arts, Sydney, documented the lives of women and their creative expression in domestic spaces.

Mothers' memories others' memories c.1979

She later explored Australia’s connections to the Asia Pacific region in the early 1990s and, from 1996 onwards in her painting series ‘In memory of the unknown artist’, she honoured the creativity found in domestic materials throughout diverse populations and communities. The related painting, Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007–08, from the James C. Sourris AM Collection, stems from Binns’s broader mission to overturn what she considered outdated hierarchies of artmaking. Through both her community work and studio practice, Binns consistently demonstrated the fundamental nature of art as a human endeavour.

Binns settled in Canberra in 1994 and began teaching at the Australian National University School of Art & Design, where she nurtured the talent of dozens of students until her retirement in 2012. Her work was celebrated in the major retrospective exhibition, ‘Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2022. The year prior, she received the 2021 Australia Council Award for Visual Arts in recognition of her decades of influential practice and outstanding contribution to artistic life in Australia.

Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007-08

Orange flam 1967 is on display in the Australian Art Collection
Queensland Art Gallery
Galleries 10, 11, 12 & 13 (Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries)

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia