Past Events › Exhibitions

Operation Art is an exhibition of 50 selected artworks by students from schools across New South Wales who have been invited to create uplifting works for other children. The exhibition is an initiative of The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in association with the NSW Department of Education and will include artworks by students from Hunter and the Central Coast schools.

In 2003 and at the height of his career, Australian art critic and broadcaster, Bruce James, left Sydney and returned to his home town of Ayr in the Burdekin delta in Queensland and became the painter Cutler Footway. My North features both the expansive landscapes of the artist’s home and still life studies in a rich palette of colour. As a satellite story to this exhibition, MRAG will present Cutler Footway’s inspirations, through the work of Grace Cossington Smith and…

The building of a cubby in the bush is easily overlooked as childish and insignificant. However the interaction between a person and their environment is far from trivial. By being in and interacting with the ecosystems around them, a child is given the opportunity to take on a knowledge of the natural world and develop a bond to the environment in which their life takes place. This bond is the foundation of a person’s environmentally ethical decision-making in adulthood. Through…

David Griggs explores the darker undercurrents of human existence. His work, predominately portraiture, focuses on the human condition; drawing on political imagery, underground media, local histories and personal experience. Famous for his bold anarchistic approach, Griggs takes the everyday and flips it to expose the cracks, exhuming the raw undercurrent of a society. He documents intimate chance moments and the deliberate actions of his friends, and strangers, within an unidentifiable Manila. His work is often collaborative, engaging directly with communities…

Lucas Davidson has created the site specific exhibition Casual Forces for the two levels of the Art Factory exhibition space. Using mirrored surfaces, geometric shapes, repetition and scale Casual Forces aims to challenge viewer perception, questioning the identification and interpretation of the work and the surrounding environment. Casual Forces invites a slower kind of looking that places emphasis on viewer attention and the present moment.

As a part of Artastique, local artist James Rhodes will be exhibiting his work Tangled Up, from his Fond Illusion series in the Gallery's front window. "This site-specific work explores the changing nature of emotional states due to the amount of information given to us. Through the materiality of the work, and the space it is viewed in, the way in which the image is experienced by an audience change as the light of the day changes. The amount of natural…

The stage is a place separated from the everyday that allows us to more fully view life, revealing all the tragedy, comedy, mystery, love and fate that are part of the human experience. When the curtain is raised, we are able to see ourselves as the immortals see us, immersed in our destiny while enacting rituals that ask for blessings and curses to be granted. This world of theatre defies logic and reason in order to reflect who we are…

For over 60 years the Maitland International Salon of Photography has attracted entries from photographers around the world. Over 5,000 entries were received this year in salon categories Colour, Monochrome, Nature  as well as Open, Nature and Travel projected images. From the accepted prints which are displayed at the Maitland Showground, this exhibition acknowledges 50 prints further selected to be exhibited at MRAG along with projected images.

Charles Blackman was one of Australia’s iconic artists, forging a significant career from his very first solo exhibition in 1952. Blackman was also a strong supporter of Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG) and, since 2005, had donated more than 280 works on paper and paintings to the MRAG Collection. Many of the works in this exhibition are early drawings and quick studies which, like entries in a diary, track the story of Blackman’s personal and artistic life. Charles Blackman died…

Touring from Orange Regional Gallery, The poetry of space: the art of Tim Winters surveys the career of one of Australia’s most respected landscape artists and art teachers. Winters’ abstract work is essentially a poetic or lyrical interpretation of space and the visual articulation of his engagement with the land. This survey, curated by Dr Andrew Flatau, follows not only the artist’s journey but also Winters’ artistic investigations. The Poetry of Space: the Art of Tim Winters is an Orange…

Working between Sydney and Yogyakarta, Indonesian artist Jumaadi explores themes of vulnerability, love and sacrifice, in his distinct visual language. Staging Love speaks of universal stories of life, in large scale drawings, paintings, monumental paper and buffalo hide cut-outs, as well as a painted bridal bed.

From paper sketches to human scale paintings, Textures of Desire highlights two major series from Valadon's rich and extraordinary 35 year award winning career. Works featured are from her Wicked Women series, and the panoramic still life’s, Four Seasons.

Mixing Numbers is an exhibition which investigates light, colour and the role of chance in this artist’s creative process. Within this recent body of work Tim Maguire explores the myriad possibilities of colour created by the digital print process, where computer-driven numeric colour values combine in unforeseeable ways, sometimes literally dictated by the throw of the dice as in the recent work Dice Abstracts. Imagery for these plays in colour is often based on fragile and impermanent arbitrary events like…