Melbourne Art Fair
Clara Joyce / Maggie Brink
19-22 February 2026
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
South WharF

We’re pleased to present the works of Clara Joyce and Maggie Brink at Melbourne Art Fair, in the first exhibition with the gallery for both artists.

Clara Joyce and Maggie Brink explore the mutability, haziness, and fallibility of memory through distinct visual languages. Their works reflect on how memory can be slippery, fragmented, and shaped by emotional undercurrents.

Clara Joyce employs techniques of stain painting and layering to generate luminous material accumulations. Her work channels subconscious states, creating vaporous visual fields that offer speculative blueprints of the inner world. The paintings exist as an attempt to access realms between the seen and felt, and give form to forces which resist capture. Engaging with the aesthetic unconscious as a magnetic field — a space of both attraction and repulsion — her work captures the tension and release inherent in psychic exploration. Joyce's resin sculptures catch and refract light prismatically, they give a sense of intersecting lenses, symbolising overlapping perspectives and visions.

Maggie Brink 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 mines her personal photographic archive, reinterpreting fleeting moments as ghostly, fragmented paintings. 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.

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.
Clara Joyce (born Boorloo/Perth, lives Naarm/Melbourne) holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from VCA and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at Monash University after earning the top results in her Honours year. Her work has recently been exhibited by Caves at Spring 1883, Syrup Contemporary, Ordinance, Cathedral Cabinet and Cache. Her work will debut with the gallery at the Melbourne Art Fair, before a solo exhibition at Daine Singer in late 2026.

“Making the work for this exhibition I started with an idea that came from Wim Wender’s film Lisbon Story. The film is about film and moving images and in it there’s a monologue delivered by another famous Portuguese filmmaker—Manoel de Oliveira—musing on the nature of cinema, memory, and art and asking whether it’s possible to believe in memory. He talks about the way film captures something that immediately ceases to exist and so brings back the phantom of a moment that no longer exists and which we can only doubt even as we are seeing it.

So painting from photographic and cinematic images I was thinking about paintings that were haunted by the phantom that cinema had ‘returned’ and whether painting could choose to clarify or only further muddy those questions about the veracity of what cinema (or memory) claim to be real, the proof of the past etc. I think I’m interested in a mode of painting that’s inherently doubting, and that would further disrupt or muddy the assumptions or assertions suggested by the original reference.”

— Maggie Brink