MPRG AUTUMN: Exhibitions launch

Join Gallery Director Dunja Rmandić to launch MPRG's Autumn exhibition series

3pm - 5pm with speeches at 3.30pm, refreshments follow.

Come along and enjoy complimentary canapés and a glass (or two) of Mornington Peninsula–grown wine available for purchase for $8. Complimentary glass of wine for Friends of the Gallery members by showing current membership card.

Michael Vale: the Cuckoo, the Herring, and the Trembling Tambourines
Michael Vale is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice blends Romantic landscape traditions with absurdist theatre, dark fiction and a mischievous sense of humour. Over decades, he has developed a distinctive visual language that pairs dramatic, often shadowy settings with surreal and comical figures, creating scenes that hover between the familiar and the uncanny. His paintings and installations resist fixed narratives, inviting viewers into worlds where meaning and tone constantly shift.

A winner of the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and a senior lecturer at Monash University for over 20 years, Vale combines painterly skill with storytelling and visual trickery, offering richly layered works where theatre, literature and art collide.

Hold Me, Hold Me Close explores the tension between intimacy and self-protection. Using everyday materials such as fabric, cardboard and paper, the works balance strength and fragility. Bags, bowls and boxes act as containers—objects that hold, protect or conceal—reflecting how we carry and care for what feels vulnerable. Through slow, stitched and layered processes, the works suggest that sensitivity itself can be a quiet form of strength.

Eleesa Howard is a Mornington Peninsula-based artist whose work was included in National Works on Paper 2024.

New Wave 26 - VCE Student Exhibition

New Wave 26 is a curated exhibition offering students the experience of exhibiting professionally in a major public gallery. Installed by gallery staff and promoted widely by MPRG, the exhibition celebrates student work with a public opening and extended display period.

Showcasing the creative ideas of a new generation of artists, New Wave 26 marks their entry into the vibrant creative community of the Mornington Peninsula.

Image: Michael Vale, Green, shiny hat (& a shooting star) (detail) 2024, oil on linen, © Michael Vale, 2025