Upcoming Events › Exhibitions

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…

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…

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…

Survey into the Cretaceous is a journey into the painter’s imagination. The painter has imagined himself as being an assigned artist with a team of paleontologists, scientists and geographers on a survey expedition into the late Cretaceous period. His brief is to record the fauna and express the experience through an artist’s eye. A broad cross-section of species is represented, some now extinct, some still extant today. Boundaries of reality are not of relevance, barriers between disciplines blurred, this is…

Adaptation (with the Community of the Maitland Regional Art Gallery, the Grafton Regional Gallery, the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and AlburyCity Cultural Activation) is a large scale inflatable sculpture that invites the viewer to journey around and through the complex organic structure, revealing vibrantly coloured and patterned art textiles, bursting away from the main structure almost as if they grew there. Using natural ecosystems as a visual metaphor, the work expresses how all clusters of organisms work together to create…

From intimate pieces to large scale works, the contemporary jewellery in this exhibition explores the act of making and how jewellery is worn on the body, telling stories that start with the artist and continue through the life of the object as a worn and viewed item, creating new resonances with owners into the future. Spanning a wide range of materials, techniques and meanings, the works on display are playful, intricate, conceptual, personal and political. The artists also engage with…

Inspired by Sci-Fi, comics and fantasy movies, Terminus is a virtual reality (VR) installation that transports the viewer into an imaginary landscape of colour and pattern by human clones, moving walkways and gateways to new realms. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Visions of Australia touring National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program The Balnaves Foundation

An Unending Shadow is an exhibition of artworks by prominent Australian mother and daughter artists, Ann and Sophie Cape. Together they have made a series of challenging new artworks exploring the phenomena of Dementia and its impact within the community. Australia, like much of the developed world, has an ageing population and conditions like Dementia and Alzheimers disease are becoming more widespread but still little talked about and discussed in public. The exhibition An Unending Shadow examines the emotional and…

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.

ARTEXPRESS is an annual collaborative exhibition that aims to highlight exceptional works of art from graduating students of government and non-government high schools in NSW. The Maitland ARTEXPRESS exhibition will feature works from predominantly Hunter-Central Coast schools.  Each ARTEXPRESS exhibition is unique, as it reflects the students’ individual explorations of concepts such as culture and personal identity, presented in a wide variety of expressive forms. ARTEXPRESS is a joint venture of the Department of Education and the Board of Studies,…

Graphic designer and artist Clare Hodgins delves into the world of digital technology, working with local creatives who develop and utilise technology to create immersive worlds. "Virtual reality suspends time to offer fully creative freedoms for the artist’s mind and body. A sense of interactivity is a core focus, allowing an audience to co-play inside a synthetic shared space. Specifically; can anonymous play inside a virtual world allow for new expression to be found?” - Artist Andy Gallagher Participating artists…

Just Not Australian brings together 20 artists across generations and diverse cultural backgrounds to deal broadly with the origins and implications of contemporary Australian nationhood. With works ranging from the late 1990s right through to newly commissioned pieces, they are united by their desire to take Australia’s ‘official’ history to task, making space for people and events that have, often wilfully, been sidelined or omitted. The artists explore the politics of images, their construction and circulation, as well as their…

Paula has a deep connection with the Australian landscape, having grown up among the bush near Paterson in NSW’s Hunter Valley and spending 7 years living on the historic Camden Park property whilst at secondary school. Both these places significantly influenced Paula’s love and respect of nature and the land, where she spent many occasions exploring with a sketch pad in hand, documenting her surrounds. Paula currently lives, and works from her studio, in Walcha NSW; an area that abounds…