Flinders Lane Gallery

Flinders Lane Gallery Flinders Lane Gallery is a dynamic Melbourne art gallery, exhibiting exceptional and collectable art

Flinders Lane Gallery is a dynamic Melbourne art gallery, exhibiting exceptional and collectable artworks since 1989. Located in the heart of Melbourne’s vibrant Flinders Lane cultural precinct, FLG shows new solo exhibitions by represented artists every three weeks.

Stuart McLachlan’s man-size creation ‘Ascension’ is now on-site at our Sydney Contemporary Stand. An F-4 Phantom, hand-c...
01/09/2026

Stuart McLachlan’s man-size creation ‘Ascension’ is now on-site at our Sydney Contemporary Stand.

An F-4 Phantom, hand-cut in paper, balanced nose-down on a block of sandstone. Two gladiolus stems rise from the twin exhausts. Swallows are cut clean through both wings and left standing proud of the surface. The plane dissolves into a murmuration.

Gladiolus comes from the Latin gladius: sword. The Greeks called it xiphium, from xiphos, also sword. Romans threw them to victorious gladiators and grew them as a symbol of strength, in part because the plant takes hold in ground where little else will. In purple they stand for nobility, grace and moral integrity.

Artist statement: Ascension reflects on the continuation of the natural world.
Objects like jets, built for war at a cost of millions each, eventually end up in aircraft graveyards in the middle of deserts. Used worldwide by many countries, they are weapons of expansion and destruction. In time these prized objects become obsolete. This is when nature, as it always does, reclaims them, turning their husks into sanctuaries for the living, rising out of a use no longer required.

Ascension, 2026. Arches watercolour rag paper, card, wood, metal rod, varnish, sandstone and glue. 184 x 85 x 40cm.

📍 Stand E01 | Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh
📅 Collector Preview Wed 2 Sept | Fair open Thu 3 – Sun 6 Sept 2026
Tickets and the full online catalogue https://flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/sydney-contemporary-2026

A flock of cranes moves in low flight through the deep greens and blacks of old-growth forest, toward a moon gate standi...
01/09/2026

A flock of cranes moves in low flight through the deep greens and blacks of old-growth forest, toward a moon gate standing at the edge of the frame.

The circle of a moon gate stands for perfection, unity and the cycle of life. Passing through one reads as a transition, a movement from one space to another, physically and metaphorically. Moon gates are thought to guide chi, the life energy, through a space.

The eastern population of the Siberian crane is the species' last viable one, the western flock all but gone to historical overhunting. Its survival now turns on protecting the wetland stopovers along the migratory route, above all Lake Poyang in China. That work, led by the International Crane Foundation with partners across Russia and China, has lifted the eastern population from roughly 3,500 to 4,000 birds in 2012 to close to 7,000 today.

Siberian Cranes, 2026. Cardwell+McLachlan. Eco-solvent print on cotton rag paper, edition of 5 and 2 APs, 86 x 150cm. Paper sculptures and large-scale photography of Stuart McLachlan and Simon Cardwell.

📍 Stand E01 | Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh
📅 Collector Preview Wed 2 Sept | Fair open Thu 3 – Sun 6 Sept 2026
Tickets and the full online catalogue: https://flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/sydney-contemporary-2026

Margaret Ackland's "Narcissus, observed" crowds yellow daffodils (the Narcissus Flower) into a plain glass vase against ...
31/08/2026

Margaret Ackland's "Narcissus, observed" crowds yellow daffodils (the Narcissus Flower) into a plain glass vase against a black and white diamond cloth, their stems stacked and magnified through the water into a solid green column. The only disruption to these densely packed green stems is the reflected silhouette of the artist. A clever double entendre.

These works are "less concerned with symbolic abundance or domestic intimacy than with the mechanics of looking: how colour, reflection and pattern destabilise the familiar." excerpt from the catalogue essay by Elli Walsh

Margaret Ackland: Reflections
Exhibition showing 18 August - 12 September 2026

Flinders Lane Gallery, Level 1, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne
flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/reflections

Suspended above our Sydney Contemporary stand this week, a paper White-bellied Heron with a two and a half metre wingspa...
31/08/2026

Suspended above our Sydney Contemporary stand this week, a paper White-bellied Heron with a two and a half metre wingspan carries a flock of smaller herons in formation beneath its outstretched wings. One bird carrying the return of many.

The White-bellied Heron is the world's second largest heron and its most endangered, a bird with almost no close relatives and very little time. It holds on in three countries. Published estimates put the wild population between 50 and 249 mature birds, and those closest to the species think the true figure sits near the bottom of that range. Fewer than five actively breeding pairs are known anywhere on earth.

Bhutan holds close to half of them. Its 2026 count, twenty-six birds in the wild and five in care, is the highest recorded in more than twenty years.

Of the animals in this series the heron is the closest to the edge, and the one whose return is still being built. McLachlan’s work honours that effort, and turns artifice into attention and understanding, which the artist hopes becomes further action.

'Continuum' can be mounted from the wall or the ceiling.

Detail shown here of 'Continuum', 2026. Watercolour paper, acrylic paint, glue, metal rods. 30 x 240cm (wingspan) x 155cm.

📍 Stand E01 | Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh

📅 Collector Preview Wed 2 Sept | Fair open Thu 3 – Sun 6 Sept 2026

https://flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/sydney-contemporary-2026

Preview catalogue: email [email protected]

Kim Anderson describes her drawing as an act of witnessing, "validating and making sense of many contradictory feelings ...
30/08/2026

Kim Anderson describes her drawing as an act of witnessing, "validating and making sense of many contradictory feelings all at once: joy, fear, grief, love, terror, beauty and awe."

This work will be exhibited for the first time at Sydney Contemporary with the other two pieces in this powerful "Fugue' series. This is Fugue #1 and was a Finalist in the 2024 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, Grafton Regional Gallery.

Kim presents the figure with her head blurred and distorted through action. Above her the graphite thins and lifts off the paper in a fine vertical drift, as though part of her has been left behind.

Swipe to view further images and details. The embroidery is drawn with focus and attention to detail: the eyelets, the pintucks, the ridge where the fabric gathers at the waist. Anderson works in extra-fine stippling, thousands of separate marks.

Fugue 1, 2024. Ink, charcoal, graphite and cold wax on paper, mounted on board. 100 x 60cm.

https://flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/sydney-contemporary-2026
Contact us for the Catalogue

📍 Stand E01 | Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh
📅 Collector Preview Wed 2 Sept | Fair open Thu 3 – Sun 6 Sept 2026

Nat Ward is a finalist in the 2026 Fisher's Ghost Art Award with 'Field of Paper Daisies and Broken Branches'.There is n...
30/08/2026

Nat Ward is a finalist in the 2026 Fisher's Ghost Art Award with 'Field of Paper Daisies and Broken Branches'.

There is no horizon in this intensely observed painting. No sky, no distance, no comfortable place to stand outside it. Ward gives you the Australian scrub at eye level, across 2.4 metres: broken branches banded like snakes, whip-thin saplings criss-crossing the paper daisies scattered white through the grass, yellow bloom, blue-green scrub, all of it built from thousands of small responsive marks drawn from Divisionism, so the whole surface evenly vibrates with light and colour.

Ward calls her method slow regard, looking longer and closer at what most of us step over and through on a bushwalk.

This is Nat Ward's seventh finalist selection this year, after the John Leslie Art Prize, the Harden Art Prize for Landscape, the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, the Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize, the Omnia and the Lethbridge Small-Scale Art Award. Good luck Nat!

Now in its 64th year, the Fisher's Ghost Open Award is worth $50,000 and is acquisitive to the Campbelltown City Council Art Collection, part of more than $60,000 across the categories. Past Open Award winners include Elisabeth Cummings, Suzanne Archer, Marion Borgelt, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, Michael Cook and Angela Tiatia. This year drew a record field, the most competitive in the prize's history.

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 26 September to 4 December 2026, running alongside the Festival of Fisher's Ghost.

Image: Field of Paper Daisies and Broken Branches, 2026, oil and wax on board, diptych, 90 x 240cm overall (2 panels, each 90 x 120cm) VIEW MORE WORKS https://flg.com.au/pages/artists/nat-ward

Christopher Kerley is a finalist in the 2026 Banyule Award for Works on Paper.This year the award asked artists to respo...
30/08/2026

Christopher Kerley is a finalist in the 2026 Banyule Award for Works on Paper.

This year the award asked artists to respond to the Heidelberg School, the painters who camped at Heidelberg and Eaglemont and turned the outskirts of Melbourne into the national landscape. Kerley has drawn what those outskirts are now.

The same ground, a century and a half on. Oil becomes charcoal. Sunlight becomes a streetlamp. The paddock becomes a paved driveway, scored with faint lines. The Heidelberg painters put people into that landscape and made a story of settlement out of them. Kerley leaves the place empty. Whatever was being claimed out here has since been built on, subdivided, lit, and left to itself after dark.

📍 VIEW MORE WORKS https://flg.com.au/pages/artists/christopher-kerley

Gina Kalabishis is a finalist in the 2026 Banyule Award for Works on Paper with 'Wattle for Clara', a tribute to Clara S...
28/08/2026

Gina Kalabishis is a finalist in the 2026 Banyule Award for Works on Paper with 'Wattle for Clara', a tribute to Clara Southern.

The award asked artists to respond to the Heidelberg School, so Kalabishis has answered with one of its own. Southern was among the few women in the movement and has spent a long time filed a step behind the men she painted alongside, working out at Warrandyte, in the same country this prize is held in.

The wattle is painted plein air, cut and held and intensely observed by the artist. Silver-blue phyllodes, the flowers built up thick enough in yellow to sit proud of the surface. Behind it Southern's 'Evensong' has been turned sideways and allowed to go soft, so the older painting becomes weather rather than landscape. It is painted on vintage handmade Blue Lake paper from Mount Gambier, deckled edges left as they came off the mould.

Inverting the source is a symbolic way of commenting on the romantic settler view of the bush. By placing it behind the actual plant, out of focus and the wrong way up, and the wattle takes the foreground for once. Affection and correction at once.
kalabishis 📍 VIEW MORE WORKS https://flg.com.au/pages/artists/gina-kalabishis

"Peonies and Old Carpet" by Margaret Ackland stands two cut-crystal vases of coral peonies in front of a worn kilim, the...
27/08/2026

"Peonies and Old Carpet" by Margaret Ackland stands two cut-crystal vases of coral peonies in front of a worn kilim, the warmth of its faded reds, teals and ochres hung as a backdrop and running forward under the vases. The carpet's pattern is as alive as the blooming flowers ,and adds a depth and richness to the abundance of the flowering peonies. The faceted crystal holds the carpet's colour in suspension and gives it back broken up, the geometry echoed in the background patterns.

Ordinary objects are "orchestrated into charged visual fields where spatial depth is both asserted and undone." excerpt from the catalogue essay by Elli Walsh

Margaret Ackland: Reflections
Exhibition showing 18 August - 12 September 2026

Flinders Lane Gallery, Level 1, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne
flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/reflections

Kim Anderson has spent two years on the seven drawings at the centre of our stand, and Sydney Contemporary is the first ...
26/08/2026

Kim Anderson has spent two years on the seven drawings at the centre of our stand, and Sydney Contemporary is the first time they will be seen together.

Shown here are details of the full artworks. Three artworks from the 'Fugue' series and four from the 'Into Thin Air' series, all made for this presentation, hung in alternating rhythm on a black wall: figure, forest, figure, forest.

The 'Fugue' drawings take their name from the dissociative state, a mind fleeing a reality too large to hold. A woman stands still while her hair whips across her face. The features are gone. The body is caught between walking away and staying where it is.

'Into Thin Air' is the counter-movement. The figure leaves the frame and the forest takes it, light burning through the canopy until form dissolves at the edges.

Both sit underneath Anderson's doctoral research at the National Art School: The Grief Paradox: Solace and Mourning in a Landscape in Crisis.

Ink, charcoal, graphite and cold wax on paper. Every mark by hand.

Across the stand, on the white wall, 'Extinction Denied' by Stuart McLachlan and Simon Cardwell answers her. The two practices work as a call and response: the body undone by the world it loves, and the world being slowly, carefully rebuilt.

📍 Stand E01 | Sydney Contemporary | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh
📅 Collector Preview Wed 2 Sept | Fair open Thu 3 – Sun 6 Sept 2026

Contact us for a catalogue preview [email protected]
https://flg.com.au/pages/exhibitions/sydney-contemporary-2026

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Flinders Lane Gallery, Level 1, The Nicholas Building 37 Swanston St
Melbourne, VIC
3000

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