Art Almanac APRIL 2026 blurb:
It’s stories of retrospection and survey and organic truth this month, as art’s roots of inspiration and purpose show themselves as profoundly human, and the works we create as living things that grow with time.
Beginning in the heavens, Emma-Kate Wilson starts us off with a preview of Leonard Brown: Painting the Celestial. Speaking with the curator – our very own Sasha Grishin – we learn about a practice that, for over five decades, has overlapped with faith.
Discover, in Sasha’s words: “a slowly enveloping beauty and a solemn power” in a retrospective that “is like going through a spiritual shower.”
This is followed by Jeremy Eccles casting his eye across I AM; a celebration of over sixty First Nations works – via two major rotations with new work, the show will itself bloom across its eighteen-month run. Then, key paintings from 2008 to 2026 are on Grishin’s radar as he reviews the first major survey in a public gallery of Michael Vale’s work – an artist with a dark gothic sensibility, a great love of music, and a collage process of art making. We’ve also Bronwyn Watson’s latest ‘On display’ selection, a 1979 Ted Richards work. Might you grow too through retrospection.