This March, Flinders Lane Gallery presents Abundance: The Pleasure of Plenty – a group exhibition that brings together eight artists whose practices; from hyperrealist portraiture and opulent still life to exuberant sculptural ecosystems and patterned interiors, collectively reimagine what “abundance” might mean in contemporary art.
Rather than excess, the exhibition proposes plentitude: rich colour, sensory generosity and emotional fullness and features new work by Margaret Ackland, Elizabeth Barnett, Chelsea Gustafsson, Michelle Molinari, Bronwyn Hill, Miranda Joy Summers, Jacob Leary and guest artist Narelle Zeller
Curated around the idea of “plenitude” rather than accumulation, Abundance: The Pleasure of Plenty assembles works that revel in detail, texture and compositional density while remaining attuned to the fragility of the world they describe.
The exhibition takes Epicurus’ notion of pleasure grounded in beauty, friendship and nature as a starting point, exploring how such ideas can be translated into visual form. Seen together, these practices map a spectrum of contemporary plenitude; domestic, ecological, emotional and philosophical, offering a nuanced alternative to the rhetoric of scarcity and excess.
Abundance: The Pleasure of Plenty offers critics, curators and collectors a concentrated survey of contemporary approaches to figuration, still life and sculptural assemblage, unified by a shared interest in plenitude, care and sensory richness. The exhibition invites sustained, close looking and offers multiple points of entry for critical and curatorial dialogue.
Jacob Leary’s sculptures gather cornucopia forms, artificial flora, crystalline protrusions and glossy animal figures into encrusted conglomerates that oscillate between wunderkammer, reliquary and speculative artefact.
“What if renewal came from somewhere stranger? My work explores forms of life that don’t yet exist: mirror-organisms, synthetic ecologies, emergent structures. Abundance here takes another form – new life offering its own unsettling generosity, growth arriving from directions we haven’t imagined,” says Jacob Leary.
Margaret Ackland’s still-lifes choreograph elegant tables of glassware, blooms and patterned cloth into finely balanced compositions. Abundance here is carefully orchestrated: layered colour, meticulous detail and quiet narrative hints at deeper layers of meaning.
Elizabeth Barnett’s paintings of gardens, tabletops and domestic interiors stage spaces where cultivated nature and the everyday life intersect. Layered florals, patterned textiles and vessels create an orchestration of colour and shape that suggests a lived-in abundance, attentive to cycles of growth and season.
“My paintings seek to portray the splendour of the season and the abundance that the garden offers in return for many hours tending the soil and cutting back weeds as thoughts drift from the studio, to family and beyond,” said Elizabeth Barnett.
Chelsea Gustafsson’s carefully staged still-lifes and object portraits extend this dialogue, presenting ocean flotsum and souvenirs with a poised, almost cinematic clarity that foregrounds their narrative charge.
Bronwyn Hill’s figurative paintings, by contrast, dwell in intimacy and restraint. Her subjects often appear in moments of quiet self-absorption, bodies emerging from luminous grounds that emphasise skin, hair and gesture as sites of psychic depth.
Michelle Molinari’s still-lifes and animal-inflected compositions push towards baroque intensity: gleaming surfaces, deep shadows and saturated hues transform traditional vanitas elements into contemporary meditations on nature, mortality and desire.
In the adjoining space, Miranda Joy Summers’ impasto harbour and coastal paintings use palette-knife mark-making to build atmospheres in which light and colour almost overwhelm form. Distance collapses, horizons dissolve and the viewer is drawn into fields of flickering pigment.
Guest artist Narelle Zeller completes the ensemble with finely rendered portraits and florals that fuse meticulous observation with a sense of interiority. The close cropping of her compositions invites a sustained encounter with eyes, petals, skin and fabric, amplifying the emotional and symbolic charge of her subjects.
Abundance: The Pleasure of Plenty
Flinders Lane Gallery, Corner Flinders Lane and 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Exhibition: 10 March – 1 April 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.flg.com.au for details.
Images: Margaret Ackland, Old Shibori and Tulips, 2026, watercolour on paper, framed, 100cm x 100cm | Elizabeth Barnett, Belle Vue, 2024, oil on linen, 71cm x 71cm | Jacob Leary, Birds 2025, mixed media assemblage, dimensions variable | Michelle Molinari, Cornucopia, 2026, oil on canvas, 50cm x 70cm