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.
We are thrilled to announce Mia Khin Boe has been selected as a finalist in this year’s Archibald prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
For the Archibald Prize, celebrating outstanding portraiture from an Australia or New Zealand-based artist, Boe’s work Drifting cloud (2026) depicts Yolŋu man Terry Guyula, a songwriter, keyboardist, and the frontman of the band Drifting Clouds.
Boe explains how she wanted to “place Terry among the clouds, […] portray a sense of time passing, and the importance of the music and art that he is putting out into the world”, while also “emulate the joy and fun that he radiates in the portrait.”
The winner of the Archibald Prize will be announced 8 May.
Mia Khin Boe Archibald Prize 9 May – 16 August 2026 Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, NSW
Karen Black, Finalist in the Wynne and Sulman Prizes
We are thrilled to announce Karen Black has been selected as a finalist in this year’s Wynne and Sulman prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
For the Wynne Prize, celebrating Australian landscape painting and figurative sculpture, Black’s work Body like a mountain (2026) draws on the artist’s deep connection to the mountainous landscape of the Australian bush. Layering oil and oil stick on the triple primed polyester surface, Black’s gestural, dynamic work suggests the shared energy of body and land moving together across time.
For the Sulman prize, a prominent award highlighting outstanding subject painting, genre painting and mural projects, Black was selected for her work Hidden Place (2026). Inhabited by enigmatic creatures, winding rivers and dense arboreal forms, the work depicts the artist’s “inner world” which she has described as “a landscape shaped by memory and emotion, both tangible and imagined.”
The winners for the Wynne and Sulman Prizes will be announced 8 May.
Karen Black Wynne Prize; Sulman Prize 9 May – 16 August 2026 Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney, NSW
Nicholas Mangan in the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art
We are pleased to announce Nicholas Mangan’s participation in the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, To pass from one dream to another, taking place later this year in Lyon, France.
Curated by Berlin-based Australian scholar Catherine Nichols, the forthcoming edition of the international biennial takes place in venues across the metropolitan region. Drawing on the traboules—the distinctive passageways running through Lyon’s courtyards and buildings—the exhibition gathers leading contemporary practitioners to explore how one moves from one mode of perception to another, from one collective dream to another.
Nicholas Mangan’s commissioned work is being developed in dialogue with the ‘Society Human Theatre’, a permanent collection of scientific and anthropological artefacts at the Musée des Confluences, Lyon.
Nicholas Mangan 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art / 18e Biennale de Lyon – Art contemporain Various venues 19 September – 13 December 2026
As a part of the In Focus festival in which the artist is exhibiting works from his acclaimed Crowd Theory series, Simon Terrill will be in conversation with curator and arts producer Bernadette Fitzgerald (Senior Producer, Footscray Community Arts) to discuss this series which originated in Maribyrnong in 2004.
While Terrill will broadcast in from London for the talk, the event will take place at the Civic Precinct and Community Hub, with refreshments provided. The event is free and registration is required.
In Conversation: Simon Terrill Monday 27 April, 6–8pm Civic Precinct and Community Hub Footscray, VIC
Sara Hughes’ ‘Iwi Rau / Many Leaves, One Canopy’ Public Artwork at New Zealand International Convention Centre
Sara Hughes’ monumental glass installation Iwi Ray / Many Leaves, One Canopy is now open at the New Zealand International Convention Centre (NZICC) in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Executed in ceramic frit across 198 nine-metre glass fins and 277 large flat panels on the building’s north and south façades, Iwi Rau wraps the Convention Centre like a korowai, a cloak of colour, texture, and movement.
Hughes has undertaken significant public art projects throughout her career, and Iwi Rau marks a new highpoint in this aspect of her oeuvre. One of the largest integrated public artworks in New Zealand, the work synthesises architecture, light, and glass to conjure the presence of Aotearoa’s teeming forests at the very heart of Tāmaki Makaurau.
Sara Hughes Iwi Ray / Many Leaves, One Canopy (permanent installation) New Zealand International Convention Centre (NZICC) 101 Hobson Street, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1010 Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa
David Rosetzky will deliver a keynote talk on Friday 24th Aprilat the South East Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Bega, NSW, on the occasion of his inclusion in the group exhibition Interfacial Intimacies.
Including Rosetzky’s video work Gaps (2014), the exhibition includes works by artists who hold and express tenderly the multiple aspects of their selves through a series of portraits and anti-portraits. In this keynote presentation, Rosetzky will discuss the ideas and processes behind the making of Gaps, as well as his broader artistic practice, and outline his attitudes to portraiture, collaboration and the ethics and politics of representation.
This is a free event and registration is required. Interfacial Intimacies runs until 23 May 2026.
David Rosetzky: Artist Talk Friday 24 April at 17:00 South East Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Bega, NSW
