We’re All Ears: NGV Announce Major Van Gogh Exhibition In 2017

The National Gallery of Victoria is getting really good at lining up one astonishing show after another. Earlier this year the NGV announced a jaw-dropping collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, opening June 2018. Before that however, as announced this afternoon, a major collection of masterworks by troubled Dutch post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh is headed to Victoria.

Van Gogh and the Seasons will headline the NGV’s winter 2017 offering, with 60 paintings (including many that have never been shown in Australia before) coming exclusively to Melbourne. The NGV has a complicated past with the one-eared wonder painter: the only van Gogh in its collection – Head of a Man, dating from 1886 – was revealed to be a forgery in 2006 while on loan to the UK. Awkward.

Japanese iconoclast Hokusai, described as a “father of Manga”, will also have a substantial exhibition during 2017, which will include his most famous masterpiece, A Great Wave.

Other artistic delights on the way next year include a collaboration with London’s National Portrait Gallery, solo shows by Bill Henson, Patrick Pound and Ross Coulter, and a showcase for Melbourne-based photographer Zoe Croggon (daughter of esteemed theatre pundit Alison Croggon).