Heide Museum of Modern Art Presents Major 30-Year Thematic Survey Exhibition by Nell

Heide Museum of Modern Art presents Face Everything, a major 30-year thematic survey by celebrated Australian artist Nell, transforming the award-winning Heide Modern building from 11 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.

Taking over the former home of John and Sunday Reed, Nell reimagines the domestic architecture as a vibrant, layered environment populated with more than 85 works from across her career – including over 50 new pieces – exploring cycles of life, memory and shared experience through sculpture, mosaic, tapestry and intimate works.

Drawing on the house’s domestic history and the surrounding gardens, Nell animates Heide Modern with found household objects alongside natural motifs from the Heide environs – birds, snakes, apples, leaves and eggs – echoing the Reeds’ vision of a “gallery to be lived in”, where art, nature and daily life entwine. Within this setting, her works are charged with reflections on care and tenderness, gendered labour, animism, pop culture, rock and roll, religion and art history, combining everyday materials with meticulous hand-crafted and fabricated forms to test the line between what is slow and precious and what is fleeting and ordinary.

The artist also plays with the opposition – and integration – of interior and exterior space, responding to architect David McGlashan’s intention for the building to blur boundaries between house and landscape. Works speak to the physical connection between Heide Modern and its natural environment, and to our psychological inner worlds – a constant negotiation between inside and outside, self and surroundings.

“For this exhibition my extended family of characters and spirits will inhabit Heide Modern. Together, they hold space for celebration and joy, complexity and grief, and everything in between,” said Nell.

“Throughout my practice I’ve used simple faces—from open-mouthed ‘oohs’ in eggs and ghosts to smiley faces in just about everything—as a way to bypass intellect and invite an immediate, emotional response. Like a song that cuts to the heart, for me the simplest artworks go the deepest.”

“Ghosts have been a constant presence in my work. They grew out of self-reflection and therapy, and from a desire to acknowledge the shadows in my life rather than push them away. I’m drawn to the places where light and dark overlap, where contradictions can sit side by side.”

“We are delighted to have Nell take over Heide Modern with a site-responsive exhibition that captures the spirit of the place,” added Heide Museum of Modern Art Director Lesley Harding. “Face Everything brings another dimension to this domestic space, drawing out its histories and reimagining it as a living, breathing environment. Nell’s ability to move between joy and grief, the everyday and the symbolic, makes this exhibition both engaging and deeply resonant.”

More information: heide.com.au/exhibitions/nell-face-everything