Maggie Brink
Maggie Brink works across painting, textiles and installation. Her practice explores the emotional and psychic registers of images, objects and materials. Drawing from cinema, photography, theatre, popular culture, mythology and domestic life, Brink creates works that hover between surface and screen, intimacy and estrangement.
Brink’s paintings —layered and ghost-like representations of inanimate objects, landscapes and figures— are exhibited alongside sculptural works and textiles that are dyed, printed and sewn in different ways, sometimes with graphic imagery or text. Brink is interested in how images and materials carry emotional weight, how they resist or invite contact, and how meaning coalesces around constructed constellations of images and other objects and just as quickly gives way to disorientation.
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Maggie Brink (born Meanjin/Brisbane, lives Naarm/Melbourne) holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours and a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at ReadingRoom, Firstdraft and Knulp, and participated in group exhibitions at spaces including Mom Gallery, Michael Reid, Geelong Gallery, Caves Gallery and Knulp. She has undertaken a residency at DESA, Indonesia, and was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize in 2024. Her work is held in the Art Bank and Joyce Nissan Collections.
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Maggie Brink (b.1983 Meanjin/Brisbane, lives Naarm/Melbourne)
Education
2020 MFA, University of Sydney
2014 BVA Honours, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Selected solo exhibitions
2026 nettle, Daine Singer, Naarm/Melbourne
2024 Euro Fantasy Shower Curtain, ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne
2024 Maggie Brink, Melbourne Art Fair, ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne
2021 Metal Rat, Mystery Horse, ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne
2018 Alien Alien, Crocodile Shadow, ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne
2017 Pale Blue Dot Dot Dot, Firstdraft, Sydney
2017 County Athletics, Knulp, Sydney
Selected group exhibitions
2026 Melbourne Art Fair, Daine Singer, Naarm/Melbourne
2025 FWD: I Love You, Mom gallery, Naarm/Melbourne
2024 Painting Now, Michael Reid, Sydney
2024 Geelong Contemporary Art prize (finalist), Geelong Gallery, Geelong
2024 Sulman Prize (finalist) AGNSW
2022 Plots Holes, KNULP, Sydney
2022 Text Tile, Caves Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne
2019 Pillar to Post, Callun Park Gallery, Sydney
2018 HOLES (working title), Our Neon Foe, Sydney
2017 Catalog, Ultraviolet, Sydney
2015 Impossible Exchange, Fuzzy Vibes, Auckland
2015 No Tableau, Knulp, Sydney
Bibliography
Maggie Brink, nettle, Daine Singer
Benedict Brink, ‘Pleasure’s real or is it fantasy?’ catalogue essay for Euro Fantasy Shower Curtain, ReadingRoom, 2024
Rex Butler, ‘Cool Hunter Predictions: Maggie Brink’, Art Collector, issue 95, 2021
Emma Finneran, ‘I don’t know where I stand’, catalogue essay for Metal Rat Mystery Horse, ReadingRoom, 2021
Mitchel Cumming, ‘Alien Alien Crocodile Shadow’, poems for Alien Alien Crocodile Shadow, ReadingRoom, 2018
Mitchel Cumming, ‘Sluicing’, catalogue essay for Pale Blue Dot Dot Dot at Firstdraft, Sydney, 2017
Collections
Art Bank
The Joyce Nissan Collection
Prizes and residencies
2024 DESA residency, Indonesia
2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (finalist), Geelong Gallery, Geelong
2024 Sulman Prize (finalist), AGNSW
