Bayside Gallery

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.]

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]

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.]

✨ 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.]

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

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]

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.]

The natural world has always been a great inspiration to artists.

Seth Birchall’s ‘Appleshine’ reimagines romantic landscape traditions, blending expressive brushwork with atmospheric light and colour, inspired by Impressionism and
Expressionism.

Martin King’s painting explores the historical connections between Australia, the UK, and India, with the hybridisation of three indigenous trees symbolising the intersection of colonised and native habitats.

For Adam Pyett, the act of painting takes precedence. Known for still lives and native florals, his practice has expanded into evocative Australian landscapes.

Graeme Altmann’s expansive scenes reflect the rhythm of walking—thoughts drifting through coastal tracks, captured in the quiet weight of autumn light.

Anthea Kemp’s work draws on research into regeneration and seed conservation, translating native species into compositions alive with colour, form, and ecological memory.

On view now as part of 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: 1-5: ‘Bayside Painting Prize’ 2026, Bayside Gallery installation view. Photo: Mark Ashkanasy. 6: Seth Birchall, 'Appleshine' 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Melbourne 7: Martin King, 'Tree of life 3 continents' 2026, printed woodcut, ink, watercolour on aluminium. Courtesy the artist, Australian Galleries, Melbourne and King Street Gallery 8: Adam Pyett, 'Boulders, Cobaw State Forest, pink' 2025, oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne 9: Graeme Altmann, Moonah steps 2026, oil on linen. Courtesy the artist 10: Anthea Kemp, Moments of different covers 2026, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist]

[Image descriptions available in comments.]