Past Events › Exhibitions

Fieldwork is an exhibition that will survey plein air painting (painting outdoors) west of Sydney between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The region, which encompasses the Western Suburbs, Blue Mountains, and the Hawkesbury, has been a popular artists destination since European settlement and its portrayal in landscape art of this period has made an important contribution to Australian art. Surprisingly, this history and significance is often overlooked in displays or accounts of Australian art which are inclined toward…

Ken Done is well known for his vibrant paintings that depict the iconic Australian experience. The magnificent selection of artworks in Paintings You Probably Haven’t Seen: Selected Works 2000 – 2017 celebrates the splendour of Australia’s natural beauty. The artist finds wonder in the everyday through glorious colour, spontaneous mark making and brilliant visual expression. This exhibition, as the title suggests, is a joyful collection of Ken’s most important pieces from his private collection, side by side with his latest…

After spending many years away from Maitland, McNamee returned to the place of her childhood in the early 2000s and began the task of retracing the artist's earliest memories -from walking to the family home located 233 High Street (now the Shell garage), to primary school at St Johns. What began as a homage to the significant structures McNamee walked past as a child of the 1950s, the exhibition About Maitland has developed into a collection of artwork which provides…

Bodies On A Rock is an exhibition of existing and new works by local artist Shan Turner-Carroll. Turner-Carroll’s practice documents the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape. Site-specificity is key to this, not only as a premise for the work but also in how an embodied methodology unfolds around each site and location it is presented. Sun, Moon Walk I, 2015 was a performative gesture where the artist followed the sun and moon with a mirror through the streets…

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.

Coming out of isolation, along with the rest of us, are faces of old friends that we haven’t seen for some time - plus new friends that have been waiting to ‘show their face’

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…