Always Modern: Radical Nurture – Exhibition Now Open at Heide Museum

Heide Museum of Modern Art has announced Always Modern: Radical Nurture, guest curated by Lily Mora, granddaughter of Heide Circle artist Mirka Mora.

On view from 10 February – 9 August 2026 in the Heide Cottage, the exhibition explores the early decades of Heide, when art and life were deeply intertwined.

Featuring more than 60 works drawn from the Heide Collection and The Estate of Mirka Mora, the exhibition brings together works by Sam Atyeo, Charles Blackman, Joy Hester, Mirka Mora, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, and Danila Vassilieff.

Always Modern: Radical Nurture celebrates the artists who broke away from social conventions, living and working alongside founders John and Sunday Reed in a unique, nurturing environment that encouraged bold creativity, unconventional bonds, and shared ideals. The exhibition positions Heide as both a home and a catalyst, a place where living differently became a creative act that ultimately allowed Australian modernism to take root and flourish.

At Heide, together the artists and the Reeds challenged societal expectations, rejecting conventional notions of family life to form an alternative household founded on creative exchange. Heide became a meeting place, a testing ground for new ways of living, loving, and making art. The Reeds offered encouragement, space, and at times financial support, nurturing ideas that were often misunderstood elsewhere.

Always Modern: Radical Nurture unfolds through the rooms of Heide Cottage, beginning with works reflecting the realities of balancing motherhood with artistic practice, and exploring how nurture, trust, and friendship shaped the Heide Circle. The exhibition also celebrates the daily rhythms of life at Heide: long conversations, shared meals, and tending the surrounding gardens. Positioned within a growing cultural conversation about motherhood as a barrier for artists, the exhibition uses Heide as a lens to explore how alternative models of care, community and early support have shaped artistic practice and the wider creative landscape. 

“Growing up surrounded by my grandmother Mirka’s work and stories, I’ve always felt the extraordinary energy of Heide, the way art and life were inseparable in this place,” says curator Lily Mora.

“Always Modern: Radical Nurture celebrates that spirit, where creativity was nurtured, risks were encouraged, and living differently was itself a radical creative act. It is a chance to step into the rooms where these artists imagined new ways of being, and to see how their boldness shaped Australian modernism.” 

Highlight works in the exhibition include: Sidney Nolan’s avant-garde paintings, Moon Boy, and Head of Rimbaud; Charles Blackman’s introspective self-portrait and experimental cardboard cutouts; Mirka Mora’s melancholic angels, mother-and-child motifs, and depictions of nature and communal life, as well as her drawings for John and Sunday of summers at Aspendale; Joy Hester’s drawings of her son Sweeney and Sunday Reed’s child-like rag doll; photographs documenting life at Heide by Albert Tucker; and Danila Vassilieff’s Devils in the Garden, illustrating the joyful and generative forces within the household. 

From 21 March 2026 – 12 July 2026, Heide will also present John Perceval: All That We Are, in the Main Galleries. This exhibition, brought together by Heide’s Head Curator Kendrah Morgan, surveys three decades of the remarkable achievements of the maverick Australian artist John Perceval.

Perceval was a central figure in the creative circle associated with John and Sunday Reed at Heide and a significant contributor to the evolution of modernist art in Melbourne.

All That We Are traces Perceval’s creative development from the late 1930s to the early 1960s as he shifted from unsettling portrayals of childhood memories and wartime experiences to exuberant imagery inspired by the European old masters, vibrant land and seascapes and expressive ceramic angel sculptures.

More information: heide.com.au/exhibitions