Bayside Gallery

12/06/2026

Join us for a special talk with Anne O'Hehir, Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, presented in conjunction with the exhibition 'Max Dupain and Ansel Adams: In search of perfection', on display at Bayside Gallery 20 June-30 August.

Bringing her extensive knowledge of Australian and international photography, Anne O’Hehir offers unique insights into this landmark exhibition, which explores the remarkable parallels between two of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers. Anne will discuss the curatorial vision behind the exhibition, the dialogue between Dupain and Adams, and the enduring legacy of their work.

Don't miss this rare opportunity to hear directly from one of Australia’s leading photography curators and to experience the exhibition through an expert lens.

'Max Dupain and Ansel Adams: In search of perfection' is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition presented as part of the Bowness Family Foundation Photography Touring Program.

Curator's talk with Anne O'Hehir
📅Saturday 21 June
⏰2pm to 3pm
📍Bayside Gallery, Brighton Town Hall
🔗Free - book here: https://brnw.ch/21x3hxV

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


[Image credit: 1: National Gallery of Australia Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir pictured with Nan Goldin the ballad of s*xual dependency exhibition. Courtesy National Gallery of Australia]

[Image descriptions: 1: Person standing in a dark gallery space with framed photographs displayed on the wall behind. 2: An instagram tile with white text reading “National Gallery on Tour: Max Dupain and Ansel Adams: in search of perfection, Bayside Gallery, 20 June – 30 August.]

10/06/2026

Anna Hoyle’s painting ‘Capitalist b***s stay connected’ depicts the social pressures and persuasions of words drawn from self-help, advertising, wellness and motivation trends in consumer culture. Hoyle states, ‘I love to paint imaginative, humorous extensions of such societal interests, their related objects and slogans or mantras. I also love the richness and flatness of gouache and tend to paint in a graphic way, although in this work I enjoy a loose open-ended way of glooping up the colours in an intuitive and aimless way, resulting in a saccharine-sicky-too-much kind of sensation akin to shopping in Northland or a $2 Shop, or being overwhelmed by gruesome farmed salmon from Tasmania and general travesties arising from greed.’

This weekend is the final chance to view our finalists' work at the Bayside Painting Prize 2026 exhibition.

📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun: 1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more via link in bio

[Image credits: 1: ‘Bayside Painting Prize’ 2026, Bayside Gallery installation view. Photo: Mark Ashkanasy. 2: Anna Hoyle, 'Capitalist b***s stay connected' 2026, gouache and metallic acrylic on wood. Courtesy the artist]

[Image descriptions: 1: Three paintings hang against a white gallery wall 2: Bright and bold colour painting filled with text, abstract forms and scattered objects.]

09/06/2026

Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s ‘Wupun (sun mat)’ draws on woven forms such as fishnets, baskets and mats, translating fibre knowledge into paint. Peppimenarti, a key Dreaming site for the Ngan’gikurrungurr people, informs Wilson’s practice. Here, she depicts a wupun traditionally woven by local women using yerrgi (pandanus) and merrepen (sand palm).

Andrew Duong’s ‘My parents’ Cambodian-Chinese wedding’ in Australia portrays his parents’ late-1980s wedding. Though Cambodian-born, the ceremony follows Chinese tradition. Duong explains, ‘The work draws on elements of a kantael (Cambodian mat), layered across the image. We often used this mat for eating together or sleeping. It also captures a soft moment of my parents at the dinner table, contrasting childhood memories of my mum cooking, waiting for us to eat first, and often eating our leftovers or less desirable parts of the meal.’

Artist and curator Julia Powles bases her practice on understanding human relationships. She describes the personal basis of ‘If you leave what will become of me?’: ‘After my mother died, I sorted through a lifetime of belongings. In the linen press were woollen blankets we had all slept under… So much
happens in bed: s*x and dreams, secrets and tears, sorrows and fears. Onto my mother’s blankets I’ve painted overlapping circles—a Venn diagram of intersecting lives: my parents, myself, my children. Patterns repeat and renew, revealing inheritances shaped by accident and circumstance. Turned sideways,
the blanket suggests a flag or banner—a coat of arms based on the messiness of family history.’

View these works at the Bayside Painting Prize 2026 exhibition.

📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun: 1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more via link in bio

[Image credits and image descriptions available in comments.]

07/06/2026

Final week to view the finalists in the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize.

Featuring the work of Samara Adamson‑Pinczewski, Graeme Altmann, Justin Balmain, Riley Beaumont, Natasha Bieniek, Seth Birchall, Bobby Bowers, Cathy Brown, Eleanor Louise Butt, Aaron C Carter, Ellie Chalmers‑Robinson, Kevin Chin, Greg Creek, Sean Crowley, Sarah Drinan, Ella Dunn, Andrew Duong, David Egan, Betra Fraval, Tim Gregory, Anna Hoyle, Clare Jaque Vasquez, Anthea Kemp, Martin King, Adam Lee, Kathy Liu, Cally Lotz, Jordan Marani, Alasdair McLuckie, Fiona McMonagle, Nick Modrzewski, Jessica Nothdurft, Jahnne Pasco‑White, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Kenny Pittock, Julia Powles, Adam Pyett, David Ralph, Lucy Roleff, Khashayar Salmanzadeh, Lynn Savery, Nicola Smith, Dave Snook, Adriane Strampp, Rebecca Suares‑Jury, David Hugh Thomas, Kate Vassallo, Caroline Walls, Darren Wardle.

‘Bayside Painting Prize’ closes 5pm, Sunday 14 June.

📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun: 1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more here: https://brnw.ch/21x39bS

[Image credit: ‘Bayside Painting Prize’ 2026, Bayside Gallery installation view. Photo: Mark Ashkanasy.]

[Image descriptions: 1: numerous paintings displayed in a gallery 2: people looking at paintings in a gallery]

06/06/2026

Join 2026 Bayside Painting Prize winner, David Egan, and Beckett Local Prize winner, Betra Fraval, in conversation with Bayside Gallery Curator, Joanna Bosse. Hear directly from these artists for a unique insight into this year's Bayside Painting Prize winning works.

📅 Saturday 13 June 2026, 2pm to 3pm
📍Bayside Gallery, Brighton Town Hall
🔗 Free, book here: https://brnw.ch/21x38fq
✨ Suitable for all ages

[Image credit: Bayside Painting Prize winner David Egan and Local Beckett Prize winner Betra Fraval]

[Image description: Two people standing in an art gallery beside large abstract paintings on a white wall.]

05/06/2026

✨ Light Up Winter Solstice at Billilla ✨

Celebrate the longest night of the year as Billilla Gardens transforms into a fantastical lit up wonderland 🌙

Wander amongst larger-than-life lanterns of Australian native animals, dance to live music, and join in the lantern parade through the gardens.

Bring your own lantern or get creative at one of our lantern-making workshops 🏮

📅Sunday 21 June
⏰4:30pm to 8.30pm
📍Billilla Gardens, 26 Halifax St, Brighton
🔗 Register to stay updated and discover more about our lantern-making workshops here: https://brnw.ch/21x36p6

[Image description: Illustration of historic Billilla Mansion with people dancing and playing music at night under the stars. Text reads "Winter Solstice at Billilla, Sunday 21 June, 4:40-8:30pm.]

During high winds you can visit our Report a public tree issue page for fallen, dangerous or overhanging branches. If an issue presents an urgent safety risk, please call us on (03) 9599 4444. For emergencies, contact the SES or 000. 

04/06/2026

Riley Beaumont’s 'Provisional painting' approaches the discipline of painting as a critical site for abstraction and inquiry into painting in the expanded field. Beaumont’s self-reflexive approach foregrounds the unstable relation between form and content, where moments of legibility emerge only to collapse. By embracing painting’s internal antagonisms, his work produces a state of fluidity that simultaneously critiques and affirms the medium, positioning painting as both object and discourse.

'The garden’s embrace' evokes a sensation of being surrounded by light and shade, and a density of colour and form. Eleanor Louise explains, ‘Recently, I have been drawing parallels between the embodied experiences I had in the garden of my childhood, and my painting practice today. I choose to leave room for ambiguity within my paintings, and the ways in which I talk about them, because rigid definitions risk diminishing the potency of what is essentially a seen and felt experience.

Jahnne Pascoe-White's work 'Embodied water entanglements II 8' comes from a larger installation where organic material change with the seasons, co-mingling with synthetic pre-loved clothing, reclaimed oil paint, and baby wipes—revealing the porosity between the artist’s studio practice and caring duties as a mother in all its messy, cross-contaminating glory. Plants are foraged from the garden and transmuted into natural dyes through solar energy.

'Reverberate' by Kate Vassallo is built slowly through thin layers of acrylic. The artist explains, ‘Using a repetitious process, it was made in a controlled and disciplined fashion. Using a random scatter of points to inform the shape of each layer, these overlapping forms of negative space build up the light form in the centre. Each layer of painted colour obscures or merges with those beneath, changing visually over time in relation to one another.

View these works at the Bayside Painting Prize 2026 exhibition.
📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun:1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more via link in bio

03/06/2026

Alasdair McLuckie’s ‘Prosocial values’ is inspired by Henri Matisse’s work 'Head of a Woman' (1917), one of a series of fifty paintings Matisse painted of the artist model, Laurette.

The artist explains, ‘This work is an exploration of a proposed fallacy of originality, particularly in relation to the twentieth century’s enduring myth of the singular creative genius. The work aims to challenge this enduring narrative by investigating the dynamics of influence and inheritance and notions of authenticity and invention.

‘The back banner’ by Justin Balmain draws on Kazimir Malevich’s association with the anarchist group The Black Banner, connecting his black square paintings to radical political thought. The promotional glow of sunset is replaced with a dense black ground. Palms, ocean and sky surface only through subtle shifts in matte flocking powder—a material familiar from kitsch souvenirs and celebratory ephemera.

Central to David Egan’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into acts of looking and the materiality of images. ‘Decreation machine’ is a rendition of the Early Renaissance painting Pietá (c. 1476) by Antonello da Messina. Through a gradual act of painting, the image is atomised and abstracted — composition as decomposition. The figures of Christ and the angels in Pietá are broken down into constituent cells, their bodies fragmenting into shards of painted colour, like sunlight streaming through stained glass.

These works are now on display at the Bayside Painting Prize 2026 exhibition until Sunday 14 June.

📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun: 1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more via link in bio

[Image credits: 1-3: ‘Bayside Painting Prize’ 2026, Bayside Gallery installation view. Photo: Mark Ashkanasy. 4: Alasdair McLuckie, ‘Prosocial values’ 2025, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne 5: Justin Balmain, ‘The black banner (holiday to an unknown destination)’ 2026, acrylic and flocking powder on canvas. Courtesy the artist 6: David Egan, ‘Decreation machine’ 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist]

31/05/2026

Jordan Marani’s painting is part of a series of works that draw from his time packing boxes on the shelves of a warehouse in Richmond. The paintings are based on various pallet patterns he collected from the bases of the cardboard boxes. A combination of high art and working-class realities is typical of Marani’s work. Here the artist employs what appears as formal geometric abstraction, based on his experience of manual labour, systems of efficiency and productivity.

‘As wide as magenta’ by Aaron Carter is a study in the way colours, with their alluring, disorienting capacity, generate both tangible and intangible feelings. Carter explains, ‘The processes of staining and dying loose hessian and coffee sacks produced swatches of various intensities of natural and synthetic dyes and inks. The painting is assembled from an accumulation of these separate parts; here both lurid and luxurious colour is soaked into the raw material then stretched onto board as units, which are measured, dissected or fractured then tessellated into a form that carries, holds each swatch in a system.’

In ‘Formation 2’, Samara Adamson-Pinczewski incorporates super fine metallic acrylic paints developed through experimentation during her residency at The Sam & Adele Golden Foundation in New York in 2024. Highly reflective paint colours are applied in multiple thin layers to create scintillating visual effects. Drawing on everyday city dweller experiences of reflection, spatial warping, and disorientation, the work investigates illusory spatial tensions to create new perceptual and optical experiences.

These works are on display at the Bayside Painting Prize 2026 exhibition.

📅 On display until Sunday 14 June 2026
📍 Bayside Gallery, Brighton
🕰️ Wed–Fri: 11am to 5pm, Sat–Sun: 1pm to 5pm
🔗 Learn more via link in bio

[Image credits and image descriptions available in comments.]

29/05/2026

Hear from artist Betra Fraval, winner of the Beckett Local Prize in the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize, as she shares insights into her practice and her winning work, Taking flight (2025).

In this video, Fraval reflects on the development of Taking flight and the remarkable works on view in this year’s exhibition. With just two weeks remaining, now is the time to experience the Bayside Painting Prize at Bayside Gallery, on display until 14 June.

is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne

[Image description: Video of artist Betra Fraval describing her art practice and her painting Taking Flight, 2025]