Newcastle Art Gallery Opens Mordant Family Gift Exhibition Alongside New Shows by Brian Robinson and Tiyan Baker

The first public presentation of 25 works from the Mordant Family Gift anchors a new group of exhibitions at the expanded Newcastle Art Gallery.

Three new exhibitions have opened at Newcastle Art Gallery, led by The Mordant Family Gift, a major presentation of works donated by philanthropists Simon Mordant and Catriona Mordant. The exhibition marks the first time the gift has been shown publicly in full and brings together 25 works across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles and print.

The exhibition represents the largest group of works the Mordant family has gifted to a single institution. Installed across the gallery’s recently expanded spaces, it includes works by 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 arrives as Newcastle Art Gallery continues its first year in its expanded building, which reopened in February after a major redevelopment. More than 80,000 people have already visited the gallery, exceeding its previous annual attendance figures.

Gallery Director Lauretta Morton said the institution is now moving into a broader exhibition program made possible by the new building. “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,” she said.

Alongside The Mordant Family Gift, the gallery has opened Multiverse, the largest survey exhibition to date by Brian Robinson. The exhibition spans the past decade of the artist’s practice and includes more than 30 new and rarely seen works, among them the New South Wales premiere of his immersive installation Zugubal: The winds and the tides set the pace. New commissions developed with Newcastle Art Gallery also draw on objects from the University of Newcastle collection and the intersections of science, mythology and storytelling.

Robinson described the exhibition as a reflection on the multiple worlds that shape his practice. “The title Multiverse suggests the existence of many worlds moving simultaneously — ancestral, spiritual, historical, and imagined,” he said.

Also newly opened is Mouth Mnemonica, the first institutional solo exhibition by Tiyan Baker. Centred on a newly commissioned multi-channel video work, the exhibition draws on the endangered Bukar language spoken by Baker’s mother and members of the Bukar Bidayǔh community of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Combining moving image, sound and sculpture, the project reflects on language as a carrier of memory and cultural knowledge.

Baker described the work as an intergenerational collaboration. “This new body of work combines my poetic verse and my mum’s with found records of our oral poetry culture before colonisation,” she said.

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The Mordant Family Gift runs until 8 November 2026, Mouth Mnemonica until 6 September and Multiverse until 30 August.