Perth’s autumn art season: Pivi’s polar bears, Wheatbelt vistas and Pica’s Aboriginal showcases

Autumn in Perth is closing with a burst of gallery activity: it’s the final stretch for several crowd‑drawing shows, while new exhibitions and major Aboriginal art programs roll in across the city and beyond. At the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Paola Pivi’s I don’t like it, I love it sprawls across three levels with surreal, super‑scaled works.

The Hawaii‑based Italian artist covers walls with slogans in a font she designed — including “Free Humans” and “Please don’t get a divorce” — and sets her now‑famous feathered polar bears dancing in blue, red and pink as a metaphor for the fragility of the climate crisis.

Elsewhere, Love addict presents 999 trays filled with colourful liquid, a hypnotic field of colour and repetition. The exhibition runs until April 26. Across town at Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, photographer Brad Rimmer reflects on two decades in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt.

Loom of the Land draws from his series Silence, Nature Boy and Nowhere Near, and adds two new video works meditating on the stillness of abandoned town halls — once hubs of community life. Images from Silence include a sunglasses‑clad teenager perched on a Commodore and an empty tyre swing above a dusty yard, capturing beauty, isolation and vastness.

The show also closes on April 26. Fremantle‑based multidisciplinary artist Pascale Giorgi turns studio leftovers into the point of departure for Worst Hits at Goolugatup Heathcote. Reimagined “trash” becomes sculptural forms: humorous vegetable shapes, replica neoclassical figures recalling her Sculpture by the Sea work, and playful motifs like a mug with a baroque clown face.

The exhibition runs from February 8 to April 26. A major focus this season sits at Pica, where Noongar artist and curator Zali Morgan has assembled nearly 200 works by more than 100 Western Australian artists across two concurrent exhibitions. The first, All That Country Holds, brings 42 significant works by 10 Kimberley artists — previously shown at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC — to Pica’s West End Gallery.

It features artists including John Prince Siddon, Angelina Karadada Boona and Leah Umbagai, alongside seven others represented by six arts centres. All That Country Holds runs until June 14.

The season also introduces new exhibitions from UK artist Bruce Asbestos, Berlin‑based Ida Lawrence and Perth’s Elle Campbell, while Vietnamese artist Tran Luong is set for his first significant Australian exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

With key shows concluding on April 26 and Pica’s program extending into mid‑June, Perth audiences have a compact window to catch outgoing highlights and plan for the next wave of openings.