9 Melbourne artists to watch
A photographer about to open her first major NGV show. A painter who left a science PhD and won over the Archibald hanging crew. A ceramicist who kept 5,000 shopping lists. Nine artists working in Naarm/Melbourne, and why now is the time to follow them.
Some of these artists are about to have the biggest show of their careers. Some have just won something. One has a new public sculpture on the edge of a lake. Between them they work in photography, paint, clay, thread, video and the darkroom.
Here are nine artists based in Naarm/Melbourne with something real happening right now, and why each one is worth following. Several of the shows are still open, so there's a list of where to see them at the end.
Atong Atem
Atong Atem makes photographs of herself, transformed. With textiles, paint, costume and symbolic objects, she builds staged, richly coloured self-portraits about race, gender, colonialism, Dinka Bor culture and Melbourne's African diaspora. Born in Ethiopia to South Sudanese parents, she came to Australia with her family in 1997.
Her work has already travelled, to Tate Modern, the V&A and Fotografiska Shanghai, and in 2022 she won the first La Prairie Art Award from the Art Gallery of NSW. "These tensions between heritage, identity and place are at the crux of my impulse to make art," she says.
Why now: on 30 October the NGV opens Passage: The Art of Atong Atem at the Ian Potter Centre, her first major solo exhibition. It brings together more than 65 works, including a new large-scale wall commission, free to see, and on until 14 June 2027. A monograph of the same name is out from Thames & Hudson Australia.
Gian Manik
As a kid, Gian Manik spent a lot of time copying Old Master paintings. He still paints in conversation with them, but on his own terms: his work looks at queer and Eastern identity, art history and self-portraiture. His 2025 Ramsay Art Prize finalist recast Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus. After a residency in Prato, Italy, he took up fresco, and earlier this year he showed frescoes and oil paintings revisiting 19th-century Orientalist imagery at Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland.
He doesn't overwork things. "I've been painting for ages, so I don't tend to labour or fix things," he wrote in 2020.
Why now: he's one of two artists awarded Linden New Art's 2026 JUNCTURE prize, $20,000 and a year to make a solo show. The result, Fantasy Chamber, hangs through Linden's Victorian mansion in St Kilda until 8 November.
Vipoo Srivilasa
Vipoo Srivilasa was born in Bangkok, moved to Australia in 1997 and studied ceramics at Monash and the University of Tasmania. From his studio, ClayLAB, in Cheltenham, he makes bright, joyful porcelain figures that carry heavier subjects: queerness, migration and spirituality. "Most of my works have strong and serious messages behind a bright and colourful look," he told Peril magazine.
A lot of his work brings other people in. His touring project re/JOY is at Rockhampton Museum of Art until 15 November, then Cairns Art Gallery from 28 November.
Why now: he's one of four finalists for the 2026 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. The finalists' work is at Fed Square from 13 to 26 November, and the winner is named on the 26th. Closer to home, Swamp Monsters opens at Wyndham Art Gallery in Werribee on 31 October: a show made for kids, inspired by the Werribee wetlands, where you pick a costume and make your own swamp monster mask.
Kenny Pittock
While working part-time as a supermarket cleaner and trolley pusher, Kenny Pittock collected more than 5,000 discarded shopping lists. Then he started remaking them in clay. "Most shopping lists are written quickly, unlike ceramic-making, which is very slow," he says. "It is through this act of slowly recreating the objects that I allow myself the time and space to reflect on them."
Born in Melbourne and trained at the VCA, he works from a studio in Coburg across ceramics, painting and sculpture. He uses humour to get at serious things, like anxiety. Fifty-two of the shopping lists were shown in the NGV's Melbourne Now.
Why now: he won People's Choice at the 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, and he's a finalist again in 2026, with a giant shopping list painted on aluminium. The show is at Geelong Gallery from 7 November to 28 February. In May, Gippsland Gallery added his work The World's Gone Pear Shaped to its collection.
Callum McGrath
Callum McGrath calls himself a research-artist. Born in Brisbane and based in Naarm, he looks at how power shapes the way queer histories get recorded and repeated, working across installation, sculpture, photography and video, often from collected found material. He finished a PhD at Monash in 2024.
His 2025 Ramsay Art Prize finalist was a free 12-page newspaper you could take home, full of satirical ads and queer news stories, named after William & John, an early Australian gay magazine. This year ACCA commissioned What's after this?, a 22-minute, two-channel video installation in fog. Half of it is footage he shot on his phone on Melbourne dancefloors over three years.
Why now: he's one of Gertrude Contemporary's 2026 studio artists, with a studio there until 2028.
Sean Layh
Sean Layh was doing a PhD in biological science at Monash when COVID hit. He left to paint full-time. He's self-taught, and much of what he knows came from studying the NGV's permanent collection. His paintings are big, dramatic, multi-figure scenes from classical literature and theatre. "Nearly all of my previous work is based off classical Western literature or theatre," he told Bell Shakespeare.
Why now: his first Archibald finalist won the 2026 Packing Room Prize, the award chosen by the gallery staff who hang the show. It's a double portrait of the actor Jacob Collins, who Layh saw in a candlelit Melbourne Hamlet in 2024, tangled in an unmade bed. "It's a portrait of Jacob, but not as himself," he said. In September his painting Antigone won first prize in the RAYMAR Painting Award at the 2026 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, and he's working with Bell Shakespeare on a painting from their Julius Caesar.
Lisa Waup
Lisa Waup is a Gunditjmara and Torres Strait Islander artist and curator, born in Narrm in 1971. She weaves, prints, sculpts and photographs, and has made a fashion line with Ingrid Verner since 2017. Her materials include emu and other native bird feathers, tapa cloth, seeds, shells, kelp and found objects, carrying family history, Country and memory. "I am deeply guided by materials," she says.
Why now: she has had three shows this year. after ever here filled Ararat Gallery TAMA from February to August. TRACE, at MARS Gallery in April and May, showed works first seen at the 2025 TarraWarra Biennial. "A TRACE is never fixed, it is something that moves between past and present, revealing itself in layers over time," she said. Then in August came I Wonder You at Daine Singer: screen paintings on hessian, stitched with cotton and lit with phosphorescent ink.
Kait James
Kait James is a Wadawurrung artist living on Wurundjeri Country. Since 2018 she has been reworking mass-produced "Aboriginalia", the tea towels, pennants and dolls sold as souvenirs from the 1950s to the 80s, stitching humour and politics over the stereotypes. For her first solo show, at the Koorie Heritage Trust in 2019, she embroidered every night after work for six months. "Starting a career in your late 30s, early 40s is possible," she says. "There's no right way to be an artist, and there's no right way to become an artist."
Why now: in April and May, Kiss My Moom at Neon Parc Brunswick showed 18 hand-stitched tea towels with slogans like NOT MY KING. (Moom means ass in Wadawurrung.) In July her public sculpture Kunuwarra (Blak Swan) was unveiled at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat for NAIDOC Week. Her work is in the NGV's Wurrdha Marra, her touring show Red Flags is on the road until 2027, and she's a 2026 Gertrude studio artist.
See more from Kiss My Moom at Neon Parc.
Alex Walker
Alex Walker is a darkroom photographer who strips photography back to what the word means: drawing with light. Her large, handmade colour darkroom prints are soft, blurred fields of glowing colour. She was born in Melbourne in 1991, trained at the VCA, and is doing her PhD at Monash.
Why now: VOID_ took her on in February, launching her at Melbourne Art Fair. Since then she has been a finalist in two national prizes: the 2026 MA Art Prize at Sydney Contemporary, and the 2026 National Photography Prize at MAMA in Albury, which is on until 22 November.
Where to see them
- Gian Manik, Fantasy Chamber, Linden New Art, St Kilda, until 8 November
- Atong Atem, Passage, NGV Australia, 30 October to 14 June 2027
- Vipoo Srivilasa, Swamp Monsters, Wyndham Art Gallery, 31 October to 24 January; Melbourne Prize finalists, Fed Square, 13 to 26 November
- Kenny Pittock, Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, 7 November to 28 February
- Alex Walker, National Photography Prize, MAMA, Albury, until 22 November
- Kait James, Kunuwarra (Blak Swan), North Gardens, Lake Wendouree, Ballarat
Know a Melbourne artist we should be watching? Tell us.
Image credits
Featured image: Atong Atem, Ego 1, 2019, inkjet print, National Gallery of Victoria, © Atong Atem, courtesy MARS Gallery. Kait James: image courtesy Neon Parc. Instagram posts are embedded from the artists' own accounts, and stay theirs.
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