After the Rain is the fifth iteration of the National Gallery of Australia’s National Indigenous Art Triennial. Delivered by celebrated Australian artist Tony Albert, it is the first to be artist led. (Brenda L. Croft had been a practicing artist for some two decades at the time she produced the 2007 inaugural Triennial, Culture Warriors, but she did so as a curator and not as an artist). Albert resists the label of curator, preferring the title Artistic Director.

There is a particular sense of anticipation surrounding Ron Mueck’s return to Australian soil – his first since 2010. An immensely popular figurative sculptor, Mueck has built an international following through his uncanny, hyperreal sculptures of the human body. Recent exhibitions in Seoul this year at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and in 2024 at Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands drew record crowds, as has his current touring exhibition from the Fondation Cartier in Paris. His Sydney survey, Encounter, presents just fifteen sculptures, understandable given the fact that his meticulous, labour-intensive works can take months, even years, to complete.

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.

Arts highlights

This issue we present the best arts productions of 2025, as nominated by our critics. Across film, theatre, music, visual art, opera, dance, and television, ABR Arts continues to publish erudite, long-form, professionally edited, and independent arts reviews at a time when space for such work is diminishing across the sector. Thank you to all our critics in 2025 and to our arts readers, an enthusiastic cohort who enliven us with letters, comments, emails, and a staggering number of website hits. There is an appetite for arts criticism in this country. Our critics show that, despite the pressures facing the arts sector, and the controversies that dominated arts journalism in 2025, there remains an appetite for well-constructed and elevating productions.

German baroque composer Christoph Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice presents several challenges for the contemporary opera director. There are only three characters, for a start. When the story opens, Orpheus/Orfeo (Iestyn Davies) has already lost his bride, Eurydice (Samantha Clarke), to a snake bite on their wedding day. She has been taken to the Underworld, to a paradise within hell.

There was a culminative air about the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s last subscription concert for the year. Branded ‘New Worlds’ in order, no doubt, to draw attention to its inclusion of Dvořák’s beloved Symphony No.9 From the New World, at its heart was the Australian premiere of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty. Cheetham Fraillon’s successful five-year appointment as MSO First Nations Creative Chair draws to a close at the end of the year and Treaty appears in the shadow of the passing of the Statewide Treaty Bill 2025 (it received Royal Assent on November 13). Among other things, this bill paves the way for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria to become a permanent, legislated body.

In the same year that Apple TV’s series The Studio (2025) took a scalpel to modern-day Hollywood – a Hollywood beset by pandemics, wildfires, union action, sparring tech barons, punitive politicians, and the creeping, existential threat of artificial intelligence – here comes Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, along with its hero Jay Kelly (George Clooney). Both film and protagonist are handsome, genial, and seemingly apolitical – throwbacks to a different, simpler, no doubt more naïve time.