Past Events › Exhibitions

Anna Louise Richardson’s work is about intergenerational exchange, parenthood and signifiers of identity based on her experience of life in rural Western Australia living and working on a 7th generation family farm. The exhibition When night falls is a collection of her work over the last 5 years working through the complex relationships between rural Australians, the environment, and ecological responsibility. Documenting the emotions and personal narrative of her relationship to the land her work also tells a shared story…

These scholarships support young achievers in the visual arts (30 years or under) and who live or work in the Lower Hunter (including Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Port Stephens, Cessnock, Muswellbrook and Singleton) to undertake a program of professional development in an international context.   There are 2 scholarships to be awarded on the basic of artistic merit and potential -  a winner's scholarship of $5,000 and a runner up scholarship of $3,000. The finalists are: ASHLEIGH CAMPBELL    ILEIGH HELLIER …

This survey exhibition reveals the expanse of Mountford’s practice from video, sculpture and drawing. Featured in the exhibition is his recent work 100 years (2016), an animated chronology of 100 appropriated artworks charting the evolution of abstract art since the ‘zero point’ of Malevich’s Black Square in 1915, as well as a new suite of drawings exploring the viral phenomenon of ‘unboxing’. Mountford’s experiments with sculptural elements add yet another layer, with ramps and apparatus structuring the viewer’s experience and…

‘Hide and Seek’ is an interactive exhibition designed to encourage gallery visitors of all kinds to seek images which have the potential to unlock hidden personal stories. The base of 500 small hand drawn and varnished images in this body of work, when exhibited on mass, act as potent visual memory triggers that viewers can unlock, privately or openly, using words and images. * Due to unforeseen circumstances ‘Hide and Seek’ will close to the public on Sunday 11th October.

Thinking of an Old Friend is a song by Japanese guquin player Wu Jinglue and is the inspiration for Kunko’s Maitland exhibition. At the same time of hearing that song, Kunko was scribbling down poems that were breathing life into locked away imagery and recent drawings. Metaphorically a mixed play list was being shuffled together, a subjective flow between his writing and drawings had engaged, all the time being mindful of words and how imagery relates to them. An infinite…

The Elliott Eyes Collection of contemporary art is usually housed in a private Victorian terrace house in Erskineville, Sydney NSW. The ever-growing art collection, currently numbered at just over 300 works (sculpture, painting and ceramics) focuses mainly on Australian and New Zealand art, but also includes work by German, Belgium, American, South African and English artists. Motivated by the realisation that once works become part of a private collection they can easily be ‘lost’ to public view, the collectors Gordon…

On loan to MRAG from a private collector, this generous selection of eleven major works includes three collaborative paintings and three canvases by Palpatja’s granddaughters Sandra and Shirley Adamson. This shared custodianship delivers a visually splendid gift for present and future generations within and beyond the intimacies of desert life.

Safe Space Contemporary Sculpture brings together three-dimensional art works by twelve Australian artists that explore psychological aspects of physical space. It features a range of figurative elements and narrative themes with social, and sometimes political, resonances. Many of the works in this exhibition take as their point of departure: the human body, its dimensions, the spaces it occupies, the narratives that contain it and the theatre or spectacle that unfolds around it. Artists include: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Alex Seton, Claire Healy…

If this exhibition has a theme, it’s the idea of falling in love again, whether this is with someone, something, an animal, your body, an activity you love doing or just your own life. The Re-Enchantment exhibition spans two floors of MRAG’s Art Factory exhibition space. Downstairs is a giant cardboard box city, which people can move around to build into the city of their dreams. Upstairs is a rather exotic reading room, complete with a painted piano, bookcase and…

The Current histories of LGBTQI people in Australia focus on Melbourne and Sydney. This project will be the first to focus on a regional LGBTQI community and how it connected with the wider Hunter Newcastle region to produce the largest percentage vote (75%) for marriage equality in the 2017 postal ballot outside the capital cities. The LGBTQI community is directly affected by shifts in thinking and the law in ways that have not yet been fully explored. Given the vulnerability…

The universe our world moves in is unfathomably vast, limitless and unknowable. But we each live in our own universe, our own small world, an intimate universe of personal experience. In this exhibition the artists will be contemplating the universe in all its interpretations, in the form of miniature art - paintings, drawings, sculpture and more - and through their artwork inviting the viewers to understand their idea of what it means to exist in an Intimate Universe.

Guns to Roses brings together artworks from the MRAG Collection, and selected works on loan, that illustrate how artists respond to the precariousness of our times; the fragility of life as impacted by war, political unrest and climate change, and the consciousness of our own mortality. Within this exhibition we find symbols of weaponry transformed into visually seductive motifs, the daily news transformed into a ten metre long scroll and the beauty of our native flora used as a disguise…

Lucas Grogan’s work spans multiple disciplines including quilts, murals and painting. As the title suggests, Grogan’s sense of humour has permeated his bold, fastidiously patterned, highly graphic, pun-filled signature blue artworks that reflect his personal experiences in a range of media. This exhibition will include painting, embroidery, quilts and a large immersive wall installation including a mural to be created by the artist during the installation of the exhibition. Other artworks in the exhibition will be borrowed from a number…