Melbourne Art Fair 2026 | Gaypalani Waṉambi

The Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin installation at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 is anchored by a vast constellation of etched-metal works by Yolŋu artist Gaypalani Waṉambi, who is visiting the Victorian capital for the occasion.

Waṉambi’s latest body of work arrives after her historic triumph at the 2025 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), the country’s oldest and most prestigious prize dedicated to First Nations art. There, she received the program’s ultimate accolade, the $100,000 Telstra Art Award, for Burwu, blossom — a mesmerising multi-panelled installation of reclaimed road signs, dazzlingly reimagined with intricately etched depictions of the epic Ancestral journeys of Wuyal.

The artist’s first Melbourne Art Fair presentation extends the monumentality and lyricism of her NATSIAA installation across a new suite of composite etched-metal works on a similarly breathtaking scale – including The River of Honey, an epic assemblage extending more than four metres wide.

Working with the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, Waṉambi is the leading female practitioner within the Found Movement, which was pioneered by her father, the late artist and cultural leader Mr Waṉambi, whom she assisted for many years and whose legacy she now continues.

While adhering to the Yolŋu law that art made about Country must use the materials of Country, Waṉambi’s virtuosic practice at the forefront of the Found Movement reflects a new generation’s expanded conception of what such materials can encompass.

In 2025, another sprawling, suspended installation formed the centrepiece of Michael Reid’s most ambitious Sydney Contemporary presentation to date — a showing that closely followed Waṉambi’s work being celebrated in the landmark Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition Yolŋu Power: The Art of Yirrkala.

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au