The Heide Museum of Modern Art has announced an exciting new exhibition by celebrated Australian artist Nell, set to take over the iconic Heide Modern building.
Titled Face Everything, this ambitious thematic survey will showcase more than 85 works spanning Nell’s 30-year career, including over 50 new creations, in a site-responsive transformation of the historic space.
A home reimagined
Drawing inspiration from the domestic history of Heide Modern and its surrounding gardens, Nell will reimagine the former home of John and Sunday Reed as both a nest and a gallery—a place of shelter, memory, and shared experience. The exhibition will incorporate found household objects alongside natural motifs from the Heide landscape, such as birds, snakes, apples, leaves, and eggs. These elements will animate the space through tapestries, mosaics, sculptures, and intimate works, paying homage to the Reeds’ vision of a “gallery to be lived in,” where art, nature, and daily life are seamlessly intertwined.
Nell’s works will explore the tension between the fleeting and the precious, combining everyday materials with meticulously hand-crafted forms. The result is a layered environment that reflects on life cycles, care, tenderness, gendered labor, animism, pop culture, rock and roll, religion, and art history.
Blurring boundaries between inside and outside
The exhibition will also engage with the architectural vision of David McGlashan, who designed Heide Modern to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. Nell’s works will echo this integration, speaking to both the physical connection between the house and its natural surroundings and the psychological interplay between inner and outer worlds. The exhibition will evoke the constant negotiation between self and environment, inviting visitors to reflect on their own connections to place and memory.
Nell explains, “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.”
Faces, ghosts, and emotional resonance
A recurring motif in Nell’s work is the use of simple faces—smiley faces, open-mouthed “oohs” in eggs and ghosts—that bypass intellect to evoke an immediate emotional response. “Like a song that cuts to the heart, for me the simplest artworks go the deepest,” Nell shares. Ghosts, a constant presence in her practice, reflect her exploration of light and dark, joy and grief, and the contradictions that define human experience.
“Ghosts grew out of self-reflection and therapy, and from a desire to acknowledge the shadows in my life rather than push them away,” Nell says. “I’m drawn to the places where light and dark overlap, where contradictions can sit side by side.”
A living, breathing environment
Lesley Harding, Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art, describes Face Everything as a transformative experience: “We are delighted to have Nell take over Heide Modern with a site-responsive exhibition that captures the spirit of the place. 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.”
Plan your visit
Face Everything will run from October 11, 2025, to March 8, 2026, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne.
Don’t miss this opportunity to experience Nell’s vibrant and deeply personal reimagining of Heide Modern, where art, history, and nature converge in a celebration of life’s complexities.