In 1998, the Gallery’s first major exhibition, Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics included major works by 24 Australian modernist artists who visited the region between 1930 and 1970. Responding to life in the tropics, they created works that explored and recorded the land and its people.

Escape Artists was an ambitious exhibition that brought new understanding of, and appreciation for, the work of many artists who chose to journey north. By encountering the beauty, harshness, vastness and profusion of life, they made art that affirmed the Australian tropics.

The exhibition was curated by Gavin Wilson and was supported by a major publication that included more than 100 reproductions, as well as photographs of the artists, their memorabilia and their writings.

Artists represented in the exhibition included Frank Hinder, Brett Whiteley, Russell Drysdale, Ian Fairweather, Valerie Albiston, Margaret Olley and Sydney Nolan. Together their works captured responses to the unique colour, light, climate and landscapes of tropical Australia.

Wilson explained that,

‘One of the intentions of this exhibition is to extend our perception of Australia’s tropic realm…The majority of works on display in Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics suggest rather than describe an event or experience. As modernist images, they possess a type of synergy that simultaneously contains the object and the subject, the world outside the individual and the artists themselves.’

Gavin Wilson, 'Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics’, 1998, p12

Escape Artists was an unprecedented opportunity for regional audiences to experience, first-hand, the works of many of Australia’s finest artists. In 1999 the exhibition toured to public galleries across Australia, raising national awareness of and appreciation for this hitherto little-known part of Australia.

The works produced by ‘escaping' modernist artists is an area of research interest that informs the exhibition programs and acquisition policies of the Gallery.