MAGGIE BRINK
NETTLE
6 JUNE - 11 JULY 2026

Maggie Brink works across painting and textiles, drawing on photographs, found images and everyday encounters. Bringing figures, objects and surfaces into awkward or emotionally charged relation, familiar forms become strange, bodily, funny or faintly unsettling. She is interested in the porous boundaries between people, images, materials and feeling, and the uneasy forms of contact, attachment and discomfort that emerge there.

Maggie Brink (born Meanjin/Brisbane, lives Naarm/Melbourne) holds a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at ReadingRoom, Firstdraft and Knulp, and was a finalist in the 2024 Sulman Prize and the 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Her work is held in the Art Bank and Joyce Nissan Collections. Brink’s work debuted with Daine Singer at the Melbourne Art Fair in February, and this will be her first solo presentation at Daine Singer.

“Amy Sillman talks about searching for what’s awkward and giving it form. That’s very close to how I work: the awkward gesture, the over-layered image, the point where a painting doesn’t quite know what it is yet. The clown and the ghost are both awkward in their own ways — both out of place, both performing presence and absence. Painting can hold those states in tension: self-conscious but sincere, material but spectral, embodied but slipping away.”

— Maggie Brink

Read the artist statement