The reimagined Newcastle Art Gallery will open three new exhibitions on Saturday 23 May: the largest ever solo exhibition by renowned Torres Strait Islander artist Brian Robinson, the first solo institutional show by Tiyan Baker and The Mordant Family Gift, featuring 25 works gifted from the leading philanthropists Simon Mordant AO and Catriona Mordant AM.
The exhibitions are the latest to be unveiled at the reimagined Gallery which reopened in February following a major expansion, becoming the largest public art institution in New South Wales outside Sydney.
“The response to the Gallery has been nothing short of remarkable, with more than 80,000 visitors already surpassing our previous annual visitation record. We are thrilled to now be moving into our ambitious 2026 program, which will showcase significant exhibitions from local, national and internationally renowned artists,” said Newcastle Art Gallery Director Lauretta Morton OAM.
“The expansion of the Gallery opens up opportunities to explore exhibitions of a size, scale and number that we were previously unable to present due to the limitations of our original building. We can’t wait for our community to see what else is in store throughout the 2026 program and beyond.”
Multiverse (23 May – 30 August 2026) is a considered survey of Brian Robinson’s practice over the past decade, featuring over 30 new and rarely seen works including the NSW premiere of the artist’s first immersive installation, Zugubal: The Winds and the Tides Set the Pace, and a series of major vinyl cut prints, commissioned by Newcastle Art Gallery and inspired by objects within the University of Newcastle collection that sit within the realm of magic and science.
Robinson grew up on Waiben (Thursday Island) in the Torres Strait with Maluyligal and Wuthathi cultural heritage and is renowned for weaving ancestral iconography with contemporary popular culture, mythology, personal history and humour into a bold and immediately recognisable visual language.
“Multiverse is a deeply personal exhibition for me, one that reflects the many pathways my practice has travelled over the past decade,” said Brian Robinson. “Bringing together new works alongside rarely seen pieces, the exhibition speaks to my ongoing fascination with storytelling, cosmology, memory, and the ways Indigenous knowledge systems continue to evolve and expand across time.”
“The title Multiverse suggests the existence of many worlds moving simultaneously – ancestral, spiritual, historical, and imagined – where the everyday sits alongside mythology, science fiction, astronomy, and cultural memory. Across printmaking, sculpture, and immersive installation, the works invite audiences into interconnected realms shaped by the rhythms of sea, sky, tides, and stars.”
The Mordant Family Gift (23 May – 8 November 2026) presents 25 works across paintings, photography, textiles, installations, prints and sculptures by Australian and international artists Ian Abdulla, María Fernanda Cardoso, Brent Harris, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, Janet Laurence, Hiroyuki Kita, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jamie North, Raquel Ormella, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Tim Silver, Gemma Smith, Yuken Teruya, Brendan Van Hek and John Young. The exhibition celebrates the significance of the gift, the largest number of works the Mordant Family have ever gifted to one institution, and marks the first time these works will be presented collectively to the public.
Tiyan Baker’s first institutional solo exhibition Mouth Mnemonica (23 May – 6 September 2026) centres around a newly commissioned multi-channel video work that engages with the endangered language Bukar, spoken by her mother and other Bukar Bidayǔh people of south-western Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, paying homage to her mother’s tongue and the mouth as an ancestral landscape.
Blending poetic verse, memory, and historical record, the exhibition draws together moving image, sound and sculptural elements to explore language as a living vessel for intergenerational cultural knowledge.
“This new body of work combines my poetic verse and my mum’s with found records of our oral poetry culture before colonisation, creating an intergenerational poem about forgetting, remembering and what we pass down over generations,” said Tiyan Baker.
“Through this I hope to give new life to our endangered language and the knowledge it holds. I’m incredibly honoured to have my work, my research and my deeply personal stories about our family and our land premiere in some of the first programming for the new Newcastle Art Gallery.”
Upcoming exhibitions at Newcastle Art Gallery include the first major Australian survey of globally recognised and Newcastle-based artist Angela Tiatia (26 September 2026 – 21 February 2027) and a world-first inaugural solo exhibition by painter and national icon Anh Do (28 November 2026 – 28 March 2027), bringing together celebrity portraits, Archibald Prize entries, character sketches from his award-winning books and new landscapes, offering audiences an intimate insight into the artist’s distinctive visual world.
For more information about the Newcastle Art Gallery and their 2026 programs, visit: www.newcastleartgallery.nsw.gov.au for details.
Images: Installation view, The Mordant Family Gift: Newcastle Art Gallery Collection, 2026, Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia. © the artists and their estates – photo by Matt Carbone | Installation view, Brian Robinson: Multiverse, 2026, Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia. © the artist – photo by Matt Carbone | Installation view, Tiyan Baker: Mouth Mnemonica, 2026, Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia. © the artist – photo by Matt Carbone