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Heidi Yardley is a finalist in the 2026 John Leslie Art Prize at Gippsland Art Gallery with her painting ‘Dark Wood, Dark Water’. One of Australia’s most prestigious prizes for landscape painting, the John Leslie Art Prize consistently attracts the highest calibre of artists from all corners of Australia. Named after the Gallery’s Patron John Leslie OBE (1919–2016), the continuation of this highly sought acquisitive prize is made possible through the generous ongoing support of the Gippsland Art Gallery Foundation. The exhibition of finalists runs from 5 September until 22 November. Judges for the 2026 John Leslie Art Prize are…
Tonee Messiah is featured on Richard Graham’s podcast ‘Australian Women Artists’. “I think it would be fair to say that Tonee Messiah’s work asks questions of you. It asks that you stand in front and notice how you feel. Her paintings have been described by her as living in the landscape of the mind. Tonee Messiah was born in Israel and spent her childhood moving between a kibbutz and coastal Australia, finally settling in Sydney at eleven. That experience of perpetual transition — of never quite arriving — became the foundation of one of the most quietly original painting practices in the country.…
Gold rush: Berlin-based artist scoops Rocky prize Karla Marchesi’s colourful floral painting style has just won her Queensland’s richest painting prize. Berlin-based Brisbane artist Karla Marchesi has just won Rockhampton Museum of Art’s $50,000 Gold Award. Photo: Dale Grant It is hard to comprehend the impact a major prize can have on an artist. Karla Marchesi, Brisbane-born and now living and working in Berlin, has just won the state’s richest painting prize – the $50,000 Gold Award – for her hyper-colourful and visually decadent paintings. It was not just the financial boost that resonated so strongly for this artist, but…
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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…
Heidi Yardley in current issue 115 of Art Collector – Melbourne Art Fair special edition ‘If I could have’ ‘Naarm/Melbourne-based Heidi Yardley has established herself as one of Australia’s most compelling figurative painters, mining imagery from vintage media, psychological archives and esoteric traditions to create evocative paintings that explore porous boundaries between memory, identity and the unconscious. Drawing upon visual languages of film noir, surrealism and the occult, Yardley reconstructs and dissolves familiar forms into haunting, fragmented compositions that linger in states of tension-between presence and erasure, intimacy and estrangement, clarity and disquiet. Her layered approach blurs narrative and invites…
The Most Exciting Australian Artists Right Now, According to Top Gallerists Every February, the city’s art scene goes up a gear. For close to 40 years, the Melbourne Art Fair has brought together the most exciting and sought-after artists across Australasia. This year, 60 of the country’s leading galleries, Indigenous-owned art centres and design studios join under one roof, offering a snapshot of who to watch right now. There are at least 200 artists on show, so even the most seasoned visitors may struggle with where to start or focus their energy. We asked 11 gallerists, along with fair director Melissa…
“Each piece of Heidi’s work could be a snapshot from a film or a hazy memory. There’s so much beauty and mystery in every painting which invites us as viewers to imagine the narrative behind the work rather than read it explicitly.” Rebecca Harding