Members' & Volunteers’ Preview: Counterpoint and Garden Variety

Enjoy morning coffee, first look and curatorial walk-through of MAG&M’s two new exhibitions, Counterpoint: Jude Rae, Ruth Waller & Toni Warburton, and Garden Variety.

Counterpoint: Jude Rae, Ruth Waller & Toni Warburton brings together the distinct yet interwoven practices of three artists, creating a dialogue of material, form, and process. Rae’s still life paintings transform everyday objects through light and spatial awareness, Waller’s work uses the motif of the vase to navigate abstraction and contemplation, and Warburton’s ceramics draw on botanical, geological, and architectural forms to evoke wonder. Together, their practices reveal the beauty and strangeness of the familiar, creating a counterpoint of ideas, materiality and illusion, perception and process, intuition and structure, resonating across shared histories and distinct perspectives.

Garden Variety explores the garden as a layered metaphor for our connection to nature and culture. Featuring works by Natasha Bieniek, Lucy Culliton, Nic Fern, Michael Kempson, and Louise Zhang, the exhibition brings together new and loaned works alongside a temporary display of bonsai trees. Through gardening, horticulture, and landscaping motifs, the artists navigate ideas of control, harmony, beauty, and the natural world across diverse media and cultural narratives. Complemented by selected works from MAG&M and the Art Gallery of NSW, Garden Variety creates a hanging garden of art within the gallery, presented as part of MAG&M’s CEAD program.

Image detail: Michael Kempson, Limited Potential 2019, etching on paper