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Tai Snaith’s work ‘Affirmative Animals’ is a finalist in this year’s Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize. The Shelley Simpson Ceramics Prize (SSCP) was established in 2020 by Mud Australia Founder and Creative Director, Shelley Simpson, to support and champion the next generation of Australian ceramicists. Presented in partnership with Craft Victoria, the annual prize is open to ceramic artists working across functional ware, fine art, handcrafted objects and broader commercial ceramic practices. Alongside a $10,000 cash prize, shortlisted finalists will be exhibited at Craft Victoria as part of a dedicated exhibition celebrating contemporary Australian ceramics. The finalists’ work will be exhibited…
Judith van Heeren is a finalist in the 2026 Maldon Landscape Prize with her work ‘Pink moon’. The 2026 Maldon Landscape Prize, themed “Essence of Place,” is a national art award in Australia presented by the Maldon Artist Network and Cascade Art Gallery, encouraging diverse, inventive interpretations of the landscape. The finalist exhibition runs from September 26 to October 24, 2026, at the Cascade Art Gallery. “Essence of Place” invites artists to capture their personal, figurative, spiritual, impressionistic, or abstract responses to the environment and land. The Prize is generously supported by the Hillary Merkus Recordati Foundation.
Judith van Heeren is a finalist in the 2026 R & M McGivern Prize with her painting ‘Old Moon’. The R & M McGivern Prize was established by the will of the late Muriel Evelyn McGivern, a local resident and artist of Maroondah, as a legacy of Muriel’s support of the arts in Maroondah. The Prize is awarded every three years by the Trustee for outstanding, original artwork in the medium of painting in oil and watercolour (including gouache). The R & M McGivern Prize is an acquisitive award and the winning artworks will become the property of the Maroondah…
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Congratulations to Betra Fraval who has been awarded the acquisitive Beckett Local Prize at the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize with her work ‘Taking flight’. The Bayside Painting Prize is Melbourne’s premier annual painting prize. The finalist exhibition brings together a broad range of artists from across Australia, both established and lesser known, whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting in Australia today.
Although she emigrated from the Netherlands to Australia as a young child, Judith Van Heeren appears to have inherited a cultural affinity for the dark, moody still lifes of the Dutch Masters, an art historical legacy she has long admired. Borrowing from this visual language, her paintings elevate Australian flora, imbuing them with the gravitas, beauty and mystery more commonly associated with European flowers in 17th-century still life painting. With a practice spanning more than three decades, Van Heeren is presenting her first solo exhibition with Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne. Known for her small oil paintings that reward slow…
Tai Snaith will be exhibited in the forthcoming NGV Triennial from the 13th of December 2026 to 11 April 2027. Featuring more than eighty ambitious and thought-provoking projects, including major new commissions, the 2026 NGV Triennial offers a global journey through contemporary art and design. Unfolding across all four levels of NGV International, the fourth NGV Triennial brings together the work of some of the most respected artists and designers from around the world, while amplifying the voices of emerging talents. Spanning painting, video, sculpture, installation, fashion, textiles, ceramics and design, the exhibition places contemporary works in dialogue with the…
Wendy Stavrianos’ exhibition ‘Early Works from The Gathering Series’ has been reviewed in The Age today, Sat 4 April 2026, by Tiarney Miekus ‘Wendy Stavrianos has been painting for nearly 60 years. She empathically yet acutely grasps landscapes and has captured the reality and mortality of climate change while rendering scenes that are natural, psychological and mysterious. This exhibition features her “gatherer” paintings from the 2000s. They are influenced by Jean-Francis Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), capturing the hardship of rural workers via three female labourers who gather leftover grains, giving dignity to the women and the landscape. In one painting,…
Betra Fraval is a finalist in the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize. Established in 2015, the Bayside Painting Prize is Melbourne’s premier annual painting prize. The finalist exhibition brings together a broad range of artists from across Australia, both established and lesser known, whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting in Australia today. The exhibition runs from 1 May to 14 June at Bayside Gallery. Betra Fraval Taking flight, 2025 oil on linen 91.5 x 81.5 cm
Wendy Stavrianos’s ‘Gathering’ series fills the exhibition space at Nicholas Thompson Gallery over in Collingwood. In recent years this gallery has been dipping into old canvases stored in her studio, then presenting shows which review aspects of this senior artist’s career. Stavrianos is known as a project based artist, each of her many shows amounting to an integrated body of visual work on a specified theme. There are 15 interlinking paintings in oil executed between 2003 and 2025 in the present exhibition, including one piece which was a chosen finalist for the AGNSW’s Sulman Prize in 2007. The ‘Gathering’ series was prompted by an…
Heidi Yardley is exhibited in ‘New Old School’ at Maitland Regional Art Gallery until 28 June. Curated by Chelsea Lehmann and Luke Thurgate, ‘New Old School’ brings together seven contemporary painters – Rob Cleworth, Nicholas Ives, Kate Kurucz, Chelsea Lehmann, Jordan Richardson, Luke Thurgate & Heidi Yardley – who treat art history as a living companion rather than a distant legacy. Engaging in a “conversation across time”, the artists reimagine historical forms, materials, and figures to explore how the past persists within the present. Balancing reverence and reinvention, the exhibition celebrates painting’s enduring vitality and complex history. Image:…
Schoolhouse Studios is proud to present ‘Comet Logic: Pedagogical Trails’, a new body of work by Antonia Sellbach. The artworks in the exhibition ‘Comet Logic: Pedagogical Trails’ were developed during a three-month residency at Schoolhouse Studios, Coburg (January–March 2026). As I worked, emergent and recurring forms persisted: circular, globular shapes initially resembling rocks, stars, planets, eyes, eggs, or cells. Through the repeated depiction of these forms, further observations began to surface. Many shared a similar internal structure: a dense nucleus surrounded by halos, or comas. I began to consider how the inner mechanics of a comet might echo the forms…
Heidi Yardley’s brief, if attention catching show at the Melbourne Art Fair continues to run for an additional fortnight over in Nicholas Thompson Gallery. Yardley has produced twelve large erotic paintings of female nudes which, in a flamboyant application of visual references, allude to the high Surrealism of Paul Delvaux, Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray. Each piece is weighted with suitably Surreal symbolism. A nude may have musical sound holes along her limbs, as if she can be played like an instrument (vulnerable personality?); or the eye sockets in a figure’s face are quite empty, revealing a shadowy hollowness inside…