Adelaide Biennial 2026: from piss to politics, this survey of Australian art wants you to think a bit harder | Australian art

“Yield strength” is an engineering term: how much pressure can be exerted on an object before it is irrevocably changed? Ellie Buttrose has chosen the phrase as the title for the 2026 Adelaide Biennial. How far can the 24 artists she has curated push their ideas, and the very materials they work with?

This is an exhibition that puts sculpture at the fore. George Egerton-Warburton gives us a roadkill cat preserved in resin. Kirtika Kain’s copper sheets have been submerged in acid baths, leaving parts preserved by wax while others are almost entirely eaten away. Jennifer Mathews’ oversized cattle runs corral us through the gallery like, well, cattle.

But for Buttrose, it’s also about pushing political boundaries: “How far can we push things in society?” she asks. “How far can we push the environment? How far can we push the political spectrum until something does break?”

“And then when it does break, how do we live in that? And how do we respond to that?”

This Adelaide Biennial is very much about removing separation: the separation between ideas; the separation between artists; the separation of gallery spaces. Works by the same artists appear in different gallery spaces at the Art Gallery of South Australia, but also across the Samstag Gallery and the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

Walking around the exhibition, Buttrose stops in front of Mina Mina Jukurrpa, two large but delicate dot paintings by Julie Nangala Robertson.

“People might think that these are abstract works,” Buttrose says of the images of women travelling across county.

“But if you’ve flown over central Australia, they’re deeply representational. And I think what’s quite interesting about living in Australia is the fact that we have to deal with this idea that abstraction and representation are not separated.”

In the biennial, no artwork is an island: it is always in conversation with another. The statuesque women of Prudence Flint’s paintings look over the mess of an Erika Scott sculpture made from found objects. A Helen Johnson painting riffs on a colonial police gazette, glancing down at Nathan Beard’s hyper-realistic silicone hands, morphing into impossibly long fingers that bonelessly wrap around brass Buddha heads and durians.

Shows that are “very smooth”, Buttrose says, sometimes fail to “give you enough grit to stop and think”. Here, with unlikely pairings of artists working in different mediums, with completely different preoccupations (at least on the surface), “things chafe up or against one another. But it also makes you think a bit harder.”

The contemporary world so often wants to push us towards a frictionless existence: no need to do the grocery shop when cooked meals can be delivered; no need to think if you can have AI do it for you. But joy can be found in friction; it’s in the ways we butt up against the world that we’re most able to understand it, and ourselves.

This is a show very much about work, and the difficulty of work. There is the work of the artists – not just the labour of creating, but the thousands of hours that went into honing their skills before this point, and the tens of thousands of hours that went into their thinking about art. It’s about the work of Buttrose in the curation. And it’s about the work of us as viewers, making the final meaning of these works as they sit in dialogue in the gallery.

“When you do the work, when you go through the processes, when you’ve learnt enough, things will come,” Buttrose says of committing to spending time with art, even when it’s difficult or you don’t understand it. “Not everything has to be available all the time. You have to put in the work.”

And when the audience does that, she says, then the artist – and the curator – can reveal more.

The works reward looking deeper, such as finding the faces in Helen Johnson’s paintings of bathroom tiles or realising that Isadora Vaughan’s collection of sticks aren’t just found objects but carefully whittled creations. Lauren Burrow’s green cast canoe holds echoes of a crocodile, more details coming to light the longer you spend with it.

Many of the artists are asking big questions – but, rewardingly, Yield Strength holds space for great humour.

In a collection of works riffing on gold to give a portrait of his father, Archie Moore’s bucket of piss (in actuality, silver with gold resin – but very realistic looking) sits opposite his gold, intricately anatomical heart (it is really 18-carat gold-plated sterling silver). When you approach one of John Spiteri’s beautiful canvases of figurative half-obscured pastel bodies side-on, you are faced with a series of vomiting emojis.

Yield Strength is a study in competing concepts – ideas that, maybe, don’t need to compete with each other, as Buttrose says.

“I wanted abstraction and figuration, but also abjection and beauty,” she says. “The things in the world are not separate.”

In a show of many contrasts, perhaps none is more present than the difference between despair and hope. “My father nearly died last year,” she says, while discussing the exhibition’s humour. “But also in the grief there is a commitment to be in the world and to have laughter and beautiful moments. These things are so entangled.”