David Rosetzky’s work Lyu with Orchid (2017) is currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), Canberra, as a part of the retrospective exhibition looking back at highlights of the National Photographic Portrait Prize from the past twenty years. A part of the NPG collection, Lyu with Orchid exemplifies Rosetzky’s layered approach to photograph, wherein his collaboration with his sitters and use of multiple exposures echoes the fluidity of identity and queer experience.
On the work, Rosetzky explained the following, ‘This portrait of champion Australian ballroom dancer Lyu Masuda is from my ongoing series of analogue, black-and-white, double-exposure photographs made with a 35mm film camera. The process allows me to combine one exposure with another in ways that cannot be fully anticipated. I am interested in the misalignments, chance compositions and unexpected relationships that emerge through this technique. Having worked with portraiture for many years, this series brings together images of flowers with individuals from LGBTQIA+ communities’.
National Photographic Portrait Prize Retrospective 22 August – 11 October 2026 National Portrait Gallery Canberra, ACT
Sutton Gallery are pleased to present works by Karen Black and Peter Robinson in this year’s edition of Sydney Contemporary. Marking the 10th anniversary of the fair, the presentation brings together two forerunning practitioners who are interested in complicating traditional modes of representation. Reworking surfaces through energetic gestures, both artists question the neutrality of their medium while conveying the intense and frenetic nature of the human experience.
Sutton Gallery | Booth B08 Sydney Contemporary 2–6 September 2026 Carriageworks Sydney, NSW
Arlo Mountford in conversation with Rhett Davis at MAMA Albury
Arlo Mountford will be in conversation with author Rhett Davis to mark the inclusion of his work in the National Photography Prize 2026 at Murray Art Museum Albury. Taking place Sunday 12 September from 11am–12pm in the museum galleries, Davis will speak with Mountford about how A.I. can be used as a creative tool, how it reshapes our sense of history, and what it means to manipulate technology in order to comment on the stories we inherit and the ones we fabricate.
Mountford’s work Doubling Down is currently on view at MAMA until 22 November 2026. First installed at Sutton Gallery in 2025, the work blends the artists memories with the technologies of artificial intelligence through the genre of the travelogue. On the work, Mountford explained the following:
“Doubling Down sits in this conceptual space, playing with both history and personal memory. It depicts improbable chance meetings and combines them with personal diary accounts and family stories, charting an alternative path through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries using my and my family’s past towards an alternate present. In this respect it is science fiction.”
In-conversation | Arlo Mountford: The Art of AI Saturday 12 September, 11am–12pm Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) Albury, NSW
Gordon Bennett, Vivienne Binns, Raafat Ishak, Nicholas Mangan, Rosslynd Piggott and Nusra Latif Qureshi in Monash University Museum of Art Publication ’50 Years / 50 Works: A MUMA Collection Index’
Sutton Gallery artists Gordon Bennett, Vivienne Binns, Raafat Ishak, Nicholas Mangan, Rosslynd Piggott and Nusra Latif Qureshi are featured in the forthcoming publication 50 Years / 50 Works: A MUMA Collection Index (2026).
Edited by Stephanie Berlangieri and Dr Rebecca Coates, the book brings together 50 significant works from the Museum’s Collection and 50 newly commissioned responses from contributors spanning Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)’s history and wider communities of knowledge and practice. Through personal, poetic and critical reflections, artists, curators, poets, academics, museum staff and members of the Monash community offer a multifaceted account of the Collection’s evolution and the many ways it has been encountered over time.
On Saturday 5 September Monash University Museum of Art will celebrate the launch of the publication by hosting an afternoon of rapid-fire five-minute conversations between artists represented in the Collection and the writers who responded to their work. The afternoon will begin with a reflection on the legacy of late Sutton Gallery artist Vivienne Binns from Stephanie Berlangieri and artist Liang Luscombe. Later in the afternoon, Sutton Gallery artist Nicholas Mangan will be in conversation with curator Melanie Oliver, discussing his work A World Undone in the Monash University Art Collection.
Publication Launch 50 Years/50 Works: A MUMA Collection Index Saturday 5 September, 2–4pm Monash University Art Museum Naarm/Melbourne, VIC
Karen Black and Mia Khin Boe, Finalists in Mosman Art Prize
We are pleased to announce that Karen Black and Mia Khin Boe are finalists in this year’s Mosman Art Prize. Established in 1947, it is Australia’s longest-running municipal art award and is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious painting prizes in the country.
Mosman Art Prize 21 August – 26 October 2026 Mosman Art Gallery Sydney, NSW
Gordon Bennett in ‘Connections: MCA x Tate’ at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Gordon Bennett’s work in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Tate, London is currently on show in the group exhibition Connections: MCA x Tate, celebrating the groundbreaking collaboration between the two institutions wherein 35 works were jointly acquired to be owned and displayed by both institutions for the benefit of the public.
Connections: MCA x Tate 15 August 2026 – 1 March 2027 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) Tallawoladah, Gadigal Country Sydney, NSW
Gordon Bennett in ‘Inside the Mirage’ at TarraWarra Museum of Art
Gordon Bennett’s work Notes to Basquiat: Totem Lesson 2 (2001) is included in the exhibition Inside the Mirage, currently on view at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Exploring the entangled relationships between artists, temporal frameworks and geographic contexts, the exhibition centres the realities of lived experience through presenting artworks from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection alongside selected loans from contemporary Australian artists.
Inside the Mirage Closes 1 November 2026 TarraWarra Museum of Art Healesville, VIC
We are saddened to share the news that artist and educator Vivienne Binns OAM passed away on 1 August 2026. Vivienne was a pioneering figure in the history of Australian art whose work championed ideas of collaboration, curiosity and experimentation.
Vivienne Binns’ exhibition Test Pieces opened on 1 August at Sutton Gallery, and will continue until 29 August. It has been an honour and privilege to have worked with Vivienne since Sutton Gallery’s inception in 1992.
Gian Manik, ‘Film’ at Endless Lonely Planet
Gian Manik has produced a new large-scale wall painting, referencing a tender still from the film Steam: The Turkish Bath (d. Ferzan Özpetek, 1997), for the inaugural exhibition at Endless Lonely Planet, Melbourne.
Gian Manik Film 18 July – 8 August Endless Lonely Planet (618 Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street) Melbourne, VIC
Coral Futures at University of Sunshine Coast Art Gallery and Artist Talk with Helga Groves
The group exhibition Coral Futures will open soon at the University of Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, on tour from Linden New Art, Melbourne. Curated by Hamish Sawyer, the exhibition presents a range of poetic and speculative responses to coral, including works by Sutton Gallery artists Nicholas Mangan, Laresa Kosloff and Helga Groves.
Helga Groves will deliver an artist talk alongside curator Hamish Sawyer and fellow exhibitor Rachel O’Reilly on Saturday 1 August at 10am, marking the opening of Coral Futures at UniSC Art Gallery.
Coral Futures 1 August – 17 October UniSC Art Gallery Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Artist talk (with Helga Groves) Saturday, 1 August 2026, from 10am Free (registration required)
“In the final gallery, Gian Manik’s large-scale oil painting, Happiness and delight in these pleasures with punishments meted out to each sin (2026), takes its cue from another iconic triptych, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1490–1510). His contemporary reimagining, populated by imagery drawn from pornography and orgiastic culture, is revealed behind a black curtain that simultaneously evokes the confession booth and adult cinema.”
Gian Manik’s inclusion in the group show New Religion at Ngununggula has been featured in Sebastian Goldspink’s exhibition review for The Saturday Paper.
Sebastian Goldspink “New Religion at Ngununggula” The Saturday Paper 11 July 2026
Kate Beynon, ‘Talismanic: the Robe & Friends’ at the Australian Tapestry Workshop
Bringing together key elements from the artist’s interdisciplinary practice, Kate Beynon’s solo exhibition Talismanic: the Robe & Friends is currently on view at The Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW), South Melbourne.
Shaped by storytelling and auspicious imagery, the artworks on display reflect the hybrid Cantonese Malaysian/Welsh and Afro-Caribbean/ Indigenous-Mexican Pima ancestries of the family collective TudoFam, as Beynon depicts supernatural portraits and spirit figures to project otherworldly visions in solidarity with positive social change. Recurring characters appear amidst a bevy of benevolent creatures, anatomical designs, and botanical motifs.
This exhibition marks the beginning of the artist’s residency at the ATW, wherein the artist will will learn about natural dye processes for the development of experimental new painting, textile and digital artworks.
Kate Beynon Talismanic: the Robe & Friends 9 July – 29 August 2026 Australian Tapestry Workshop South Melbourne, VIC
Peter Robinson in Serakai Studio’s exhibition ‘CERTAINLY TOKYO’ at Path Omotesando, Tokyo
Drawing from the exhibition at GOLD in Hong Kong earlier this year, Serakai Studio curatorial director Tobias Berger is presenting the second iteration of the group show CERTAINLY at Path Omotesando in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan. Works from Peter Robinson’s recent sculptural series Charcoal Drawings will be exhibited alongside textured, gestural works on paper.
CERTAINLY TOKYO 5 July – 30 September 2026 Serakai Studios at Path Omotesando Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Sara Hughes, ‘All My Favourite Shapes’, at He Waka Tuia Art + Museum
Sara Hughes will present the latest edition of her interactive project All My Favourite Shapes in the upcoming exhibition PLAY 5 at Te Waka Tuia Art + Museum in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand. Previously exhibited at Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2019) and in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2020), the installation invites gallery visitors to make decisions about composition, form and colour using a series of colourful magnets on the gallery wall. Over the course of the exhibition, this communally-produced abstract work is constantly evolving, dependent on the decisions and actions of the audience.
PLAY 5 4 July – 16 August 2026 Te Waka Tuia Art + Museum Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand
Gian Manik is included in the group exhibition New Religion at Ngununggula, exhibiting his work Happiness and delight in these pleasures with punishments meted out to each sin (2026). Taking early Netherlandish painter’s Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) as a point of departure, Manik paints a dense cacophony of bodies that echoes Bosch’s invocations of excess and temptation. Provided a framework through Bosch’s work, Manik transposes pornographic and symbolic imagery alike upon set versions of the Garden of Eden, Earthy Delights, and Hell. Here, this imagery is freed from hierarchical distinctions and fixed associations, allowing space for playfulness and contradiction where depictions of fleshly pleasure operate simultaneously as moral warning, spectacle, and entertainment.
Fostering a dialogue between works of art and objects from both historical and contemporary origins, New Religion explores how contemporary artists engage with religious imagery, belief systems, and symbolic forms to consider the ways in which ideas of faith, power, and meaning take shape. Historic modes of devotion, morality, and reverence are reimagined through contemporary materials and perspectives, creating new points of connection between past and present.
New Religion 27 June – 18 October 2026 Ngununggula Southern Highlands, NSW
Image: Gian Manik Happiness and delight in these pleasures with punishments meted out to each sin, 2026 (artwork detail) Oil on linen 206 x 375cm
Marlee McMahon’s work is included in the group exhibition # at Netherlands, Melbourne. Showing alongside artists Masato Takasaka, Andrew Nille, Tia Ansell and Lachlan Stonehouse, the exhibition explores ideas of “codes, grids, and threads” across practices.
# (group exhibition) 17 June – 27 June 2026 Netherlands West Melbourne, VIC
Raafat Ishak in ‘Migration and Modernism’ at the National Gallery of Australia
Raafat Ishak’s works Apnea 3, Apnea 7 and Apnea 15 (each 2015) are included in the group exhibition Migration and Modernism, spotlighting works by émigré artists in the NGA collection whose practices engage with the development and legacies of Modernism in Australia, and how the country’s cultural infrastructure has been shaped by the patterns and stories of migration.
Emerging out of the artist’s PhD research, where Ishak looked to investigate the relationship between Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Sqaure (1915) and the holy Kaaba black cube at Mecca, Apnea included a suite of fifteen A4 sized paintings on MDF, each figuring a half black cube haphazardly occupying interim spaces within the National Gallery of Victoria: corridors, foyers, storage spaces and external courtyards of the museum. The half black cube resists and blocks light emanating from exhibition spaces, articulating its inherent incapacity to socialise with art and in turn its continuous state of flux from one space to another.
Migration and Modernism 23 May 2026 – 7 March 2027 National Gallery of Australia Canberra, ACT Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country
Gian Manik’s painting Imagine, you’re young and know what you want (2025) is currently on view in the group exhibition Myth Makers at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, Sydney.
Through a series of self-portraits, Myth Makers interprets myths of nationhood and family, authorship and agency, paradise and mortality, as vital to visions of self. A constellation of painting, sculpture, film and installation, the exhibition charts how age-old ideas of ritual and inheritance intersect with contemporary forces of digital image culture and surveillance systems to form, and fragment, modern identity.
Myth Makers 27 May – 23 August 2026 Woollahra Gallery at Redheaf Sydney, NSW
Simon Terrill ‘Crowd Theory’ Billboards in Footscray
Works from Simon Terrill’s acclaimed Crowd Theory series have been installed as billboards in Footscray, VIC, as a part of the In Focus Festival exhibition organised by Maribyrnong City Council.
Celebrating photography in public spaces across Maribyrnong, the exhibition brings together artists working across the photographic medium to explore ideas of representation, belonging, and participation.
Terrill’s billboards are located on the corner of Irving Street and Albert Street in Footscray.
Simon Terrill In Focus Festival 21 April – 31 May 2026 Various venues, City of Maribyrnong, VIC
“But then there are paintings like Skull (2025) and Scallop shell (2025), which by contrast appear strangely frameless. The eponymous shell casts a shadow against a white wall, but there is no painted frame of white paper to indicate another layer of mediation, and the skull almost reaches the edges of the wooden panel itself. The printed-object works prompt me to speculate on the nature of the source material or referent for these seemingly “frameless” works, but the question also feels incongruous. Instead, through Robb’s effective conceptual and technical deployment of trompe l’oeil, the latter compositions self-reflexively draw attention to the fact that the illusionistic painted surface covers the whole wooden board in all cases.”
– Amy May Stuart, 2026
We are pleased to share that In Time, Rachael Robb’s solo exhibition at Sutton Gallery, has been reviewed in this week’s Memo.
Amy May Stuart “Rachael Robb, In Time” 16 May 2026 Memo Review (online)
We are pleased to share that Mia Khin Boe is a finalist in the prestigious Hadley’s Art Prize. The prize is country’s most generous, awarding $100,000 for a portrayal of Australian landscape.
The exhibition of the finalists will take place at Hadley’s Orient Hotel in Hobart, with the winner announced 31 July.
Hadley’s Art Prize 1 August – 23 August 2026 Hadley’s Orient Hotel Hobart, TAS
Nusra Latif Qureshi in Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific at the V&A, London
Paintings by Nusra Latif Qureshi will be on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington, London as a part of the museum’s ongoing collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane. Bringing together highlights from QAGOMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial (APT), Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific offer an unparalleled view of the Asia Pacific region’s dynamic creative landscape, foregrounding First Nations perspectives and diverse artistic approaches with works by over 40 pioneering artists.
Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Opens 16 May 2026 V&A South Kensington London, UK
Works by Aleks Danko are included in the group exhibition Art + Language at Geelong Gallery, Geelong. Curated by Katarina Paseta, the exhibition explores the enduring engagement with language as a means for creative innovation, critical inquiry, and poetic expression by some of Australia’s leading proponents of text-based art from the mid-1960s until today.
Art + Language 14 March – 17 May Geelong Gallery Geelong, VIC
“Gian Manik, whose work occupies the main gallery, revels in the tensions of being-in any-place, whether dreamt and faraway, or awake and nearby” – Rosemary Overell, 2026
The group exhibition Dreaming from afar (Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland) has been reviewed in Art New Zealand magazine. Including a major new suite of paintings by Gian Manik alongside works from Tyrone Te Waa and brunelle dias primbs, the exhibition considers the complexities of history and nostalgia through a painterly environment that blends the physical with the imaginary.
Rosemary Overell “Tyrone Te Waa, brunelle dias primbs & Gian Manik: Dreaming from afar” Art New Zealand Issue 198, Winter 2026 Reader. Pp. 42-43.
