NICHOLAS CURRIE
Nicholas Currie is an artist and curator working with painting, sculpture and performance. Currie is from the Mununjali clan of the Yugambeh language group, with connection to Kuku Yalanji, and currently lives on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Humour and kindness are undercurrents to the major themes addressed in his works: contemporary Indigenous perspectives, hauntology and exploration of identity within current Australia.
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Nicholas Currie is an artist and curator working with painting, sculpture and performance. Currie is from the Mununjali clan of the Yugambeh language group, with connection to Kuku Yalanji, and currently lives on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Humour and kindness are undercurrents to the major themes addressed in his works: contemporary Indigenous perspectives, hauntology and exploration of identity within current Australia.
Currie’s projects in 2026 include a large commissioned body of work for NEW26 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, Black Dot and Caves, as well as a number of curated group exhibitions. Currie has exhibited at Daine Singer, Connors Connors, Sullivan + Strumpf, Futures, Kings Artist Run Space, Blak Dot Gallery, Koorie Heritage Trust, Outer Space, Craft, Incinerator Gallery, Ordinance Gallery, and the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. He recently presented ‘Stars, Scars, Sagas' together with Amelia Griffin-Toovey through the Public Art Melbourne Test Site program. Currie has published two artist books with Stray Pages: I can laugh with you and OBSERVATION NOITAVRESBO. He has a BFA Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts.
His work is held in collections including Monash University, Nillumbik Council, and ANZ. -
Nicholas Currie (b.2001, Bundoora, Naarm/Melbourne, lives and works Naarm/Melbourne)
Education
2024 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Honours, The University of Melbourne Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (2024)
2023 Koorie Heritage Trust Blak Designer, Ceramics
2020-22 Bachelor of Fine Arts, The University of Melbourne Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
2018 Eltham Collage, Cert IV in Film and TelevisionSolo exhibitions
2026 (forthcoming) Black Dot Gallery
2026 ‘Rodney Currie Stars in a Movie’, Soft Infrastructures, Next Wave
2026 Messenger, Daine Singer
2026 BALA TING, with Marli Maddison, Caves Gallery
2025 Something to call my own, 4 Langridge Street
2025 A Week’s Worth, Daine Singer
2025 Stars, Scars, Sagas, together with Amelia Griffin-Toovey, Public Art Melbourne Test Site Program
2025 I saw the yeti man; the yeti man saw me, Connors Connors
2023 DOG Painting and Candles, Futures
2023 Crying to Patsy Cline, Bus Projects
2023 Rising Festival performance gala
2022 Stuck, Dungeon and Meadow
2022 I don’t know how to swim, Kings Artist Run
2022 Making Echoes, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston
2021 Un-sports-man-like, Blak Dot Gallery
Group exhibitions
2026 That time I was taking the washing off the line with a possum wrapped around one arm talking about the tail end of a wooden snake when there was a loud cracking sound and an old sugar gum very nearly crushed our beautiful baby, daisy with Nicholas Currie, West Space
2026 NEW26, ACCA
2026 Melbourne Art Fair
2026 Word Picture II, Hair ARI, Naarm/Melbourne
2026 Local Remix Assembly: Artist colonies, residencies and the Collection, Montsalvat
2025 In My Prime, Sullivan and Strumpf
2024 Group exhibition, Mary Cherry
2024 Stranger Than Fiction, West Space
2024 Next Wave, Free Breakfast, Public program and group exhibition
2024 VCA Grad Show, Honours graduate showcase
2023 Kate Challis RAKA Award finalist exhibition
2023 Fired Up, Blak Design Program, Koorie Heritage Trust
2022 Remix, Montsalvat
2022 Twosixty (Moreland Council), Fowl Play, Public Performance
2022 Testing Grounds residency at Victoria Market, residency and public performance
2022 Koorie Heritage Trust Art Show
2021 VCA Grad Show
2021 Koorie Heritage Trust Art Show
2021 VCA Art Space, Real Art
2021 ERINYS, Margaret Lawrence Gallery
2020 Waiting Room, VCA Art Space
Curatorial
2025 Curator, Big Smart, Incinerator Gallery
2022 Curator, Grimace, Temporalist Gallery
2023-5 Koorie Heritage Trust, Blak Design Co-ordinator
2022- ongoing Co-curator and Gallerist of Temporalist Gallery
Residencies
2026 Soft Infrastructure commission, Next Wave
2023 Nillumbik Council artist in residence
2022 Testing Grounds
2021-2 Gallery 17
Collections
Monash University
Nillumbik Council
ANZSelected reading
2026 Kathryne Genevieve Honey and Anita King, ‘Art and Theoriousness’, Artlink 46:22026 Cameron Hurst, NEW26 review, Memo
2025 Nicholas Currie: OBSERVATION NOITAVRESBO, Stray Pages, Melbourne, 2025
2025 daisy, None of Us Are Free / When One of Us Is Chained, Memo Magazine Issue 3
2025 daisy and Nicholas Currie, ‘Talking to you my brother’, Un Magazine 19.1
2024 Banksia: Nicholas Currie on installation as part of West Space exhibition 'Stranger than fiction', Segments, RRR
2024 ‘Cool mob doing cool shit - Nicholas Currie’, Gammin Threads2023 Maya Hodge, ‘Tastemakers: Nicholas Currie’, Art Collector issue 103, January-March 2023
2023 Nicholas Currie, I can laugh with you, Stray Pages, Melbourne, 2023
“Let’s begin with Nicholas Currie. A funny guy. He gets straight to the point and invites you into his jokes with spare words, confident lines, and gestural smudges. In Personally I was There (2025), ‘Nick was here’ is scrawled across an otherwise abstract, monochrome painting. It’s refreshingly simple, like scratching your name on the back of the dunny door. The artist was there, is here, the work is present, although still haunted by the past. Hauntology (Derrida’s term for the way the past continues to haunt the present) is central to how Currie thinks about his work. A theorious word to be sure. Haunted + ontology: ghosts, ghouls, and unfinished business. For Currie, humour and hauntings are part of the same move, one works to lighten the load of the other. The joke punctures the performance of artistic seriousness without collapsing the emotional weight underneath it.”
Nicholas Currie portrait, photograph: Angus Brown