Gallery 1

Urban group exhibition

19 - 30 August 2026

please note last day of exhibition ends on 30 August at 3pm

Opening night

21 August | 6 - 8 pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm

Celebration of Urban Living brings together artists who capture the spirit, complexity and rhythm of contemporary city life. The exhibition explores the many layers of the urban experience, from the energy and density of city spaces to the quiet, overlooked moments that often exist between them.

Through diverse artistic perspectives, the exhibition considers how cities shape our identities, communities and connections. The works respond to the pulse of urban life through architecture, movement, streetscapes and the people who inhabit them, while also reflecting the emotional landscapes and personal stories that unfold within the city.

Together, these works offer a multifaceted portrait of urban living, celebrating both its vibrancy and its contrasts, and inviting audiences to see the familiar city through fresh and unexpected perspectives.

ARTISTS

Robyn Blaikie, Gloria Li and Steve Hall, Nick Delaney   

Gloria Li

Artist Statement

Born in New Zealand, Gloria Li is an emerging artist currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Art Painting at RMIT. She weaves together memories and emotions of special places with a semi-realistic painting style that is influenced by photography. She uses oil painting to explore the beautiful, often overlooked moments in daily life.

In this series of paintings, she captures the atmosphere and warmth of the city life and draws parallels from both Melbourne and Auckland – where the artist spent most of her life. She paints real places she has visited from bustling skyscrapers to quiet streets and cozy interior spaces. All paintings are inspired by real moments and places, and she offers a glimpse into her personal life living in the city across two countries.

Artist Bio

Gloria Li is an emerging artist from New Zealand, currently based in Melbourne. Through oil painting, she weaves together memories and emotions of places and personally lived experiences with a detailed semi-realistic painting style that is influenced by photography. She uses her practice to explore the beautiful, often overlooked moments in daily life. She is now in her final year of completing a Bachelor of Fine Art Painting at RMIT, and she intends to continue developing her studio practice and exhibit in Australia as an oil painter.

Nick Delaney

Artist Statement

Solo Tokyo: A Nighttime Exploration of Solitude in the City 

In this series, "Solo Tokyo," I capture the city's vibrant yet solitary essence through a series of night photographs taken walking the streets of Tokyo on my own. 

Each image reflects the quiet beauty and introspective mood of the built environment after dark, often featuring single individuals immersed in the urban landscape. The collection invites viewers to experience Tokyo's nocturnal atmosphere, emphasising themes of solitude, reflection, and the intricate interplay between human presence and the cityscape at night. 

Camera - Mamiya RZ67 

Film - Kodak Ektar 100

Artist Bio

Nick Delaney is an Australian photographer whose career spans fashion, portraiture, advertising, film & TV, and fine art.

After studying photography in Melbourne, he spent more than 20 years living and working in London, collaborating on international campaigns and editorial productions throughout Europe.

His commercial work includes globally published film promos, award-winning advertising campaigns, and widely recognised charity photography.

Alongside his commercial practice, Delaney has maintained a lifelong passion for photographing cities on film, creating images that explore architecture, geometry, and the relationship between the built environment and human experience.

Robyn Blaikie

Artist Statement

Robyn Blaikie is an oil and gouache painter and a printmaker, drawn to depict her observations of life around her, personal impressions of moments in time. Transient moments hinting at a hidden narrative, emerging from the ephemeral changing effects of light on surfaces within the landscape, on figures, on every-day objects. Her work is an expression of her emotional connection to the natural world, her community and family. The exhibition Urban presents images, from Robyn’s observations, hidden narratives of her local community, Coburg and surrounding suburbs. 

Robyn’s folio of work in the Urban show is a collection of oil paintings focused on the vibrant, diverse environment and community of Coburg. Living in Coburg for over 20 years, regularly walking its colourful streets with her elderly greyhound, Archie, Robyn loves absorbing the changing nature of her surrounds, one moment bustling and crazy, the next quiet, friendly and peaceful.

Artist Bio

Robyn Blaikie is a painter and printmaker living in Coburg, Victoria. Her expressive style depicts her observations of life around her, personal impressions of moments in time. She explores various mediums to capture transient moments, the changing effects of light and colour on surfaces within the landscape, on figures, on every-day objects. 

She completed her Secondary art teacher training in the 80s and worked as a teacher for over 30 years in Victoria and the Northern Territory. During the years raising a family and working with students, Robyn continued with her own art work. Since retiring she now concentrates fully on her painting, drawing and printmaking, working regularly in her home studio in Coburg and at the Baldessin Studio in Saint Andrews. Robyn is an oil and gouache painter and in printmaking loves the Mokulito process. Her love of the Mokulito began at Baldessin Studio, through a Barbie Kjar workshop in 2022. Robyn has exhibited in many shows over the years; recently at Sol Gallery, Brunswick, Red Gallery, Nth Fitzroy, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, Abbotsford, Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Ladder Art Space, Kew. 

Steven Hall

Artist Statement

Steven Hall is an oil painter whose work is grounded in the precepts of realism and early French impressionism. New work is evolving to include more imaginative interventions. His practice enquires into how, historically, and perhaps even to this day, realistic paintings are understood as a more objective record of people, places and objects. Through interventions in painted scenes that exist as superficially true accounts of place and time, this notion is called into question. This is achieved by way of including elements that are not literal references to photographs and sketches, or even from life, but are from imagination. More of this idea is evident in recent experiments with painted forest scenes that are replete with elements that do not belong: architectural ruins, birds, frogs, the giant of the Appenines. Current paintings of city scenes are populated by figures with drastically modified features, or who have been painted into scenes from imagination.

The paintings presented for this exhibition were inspired by the indescribable feeling of summer in the city of Melbourne in early 2026. Steven has painted this feeling as the city and its people. Given that previous paintings were of the city as ghostly / devoid of people, the new paintings also represent an evolution of the artist’s work. The idea for painting figures in the city was inspired by painting the forest, which by contrast, is teeming with life. People in the city are the life of the city: they give it vibrancy, spirit and life.

Whilst he is now an experienced oil painter, Steven continues to experiment with new techniques and ideas to improve his practice. The paintings in this exhibition are literally multi-layered. Beginning with a base layer of willow charcoal drawing on stretched linen or canvas, which is fixed in place, painted over with a grissaile oil underpainting to determine values, and finished with a final, semi-transparent layer of colour oils.

The subject of the summer in the city series is in lockstep with the early impressionist’s championing of the everyday, lived experience of ordinary people. But more than holding up a mirror to reality, as mentioned, Steven’s new paintings incorporate elements from lived experience via changes to figures and scenes, and the inclusion of new elements from imagination. These interventions elevate the work above pure literal representation and distill the mood of the recognisable places depicted.

Artist Bio

Steven Hall is an oil painter born in Melbourne and raised in Warrnambool, Victoria. He is currently based in Belgrave, on the outskirts of Melbourne. Early artwork exhibited in Warrnambool were of loosely painted cityscapes. His practice incorporates still life, portraiture, abstract and landscape. Inspiration comes from life by the coast, the city and countryside. The recent move to Belgrave inspired paintings of the surrounding forest. These paintings sharply contrast with cityscapes, however the former has influenced the latter, in the sense that recent paintings are populated with people: the life of the city, a throughline to the forest landscape which is teeming with life. Studio work is inspired by lived experiences, with a focus on experimenting with technique and materials; testing the boundaries of realism and embedding colour theory into practice.

Steven has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Deakin Warrnambool, a Postgraduate Diploma of Creative Writing from Melbourne University, a Visual Art & Design degree from Australian Catholic University in Fitzroy. He has shown in numerous group exhibitions throughout Melbourne, Geelong, country Victoria and Sydney, such as at Artemisia Gallery, Brunswick Street Gallery, Geelong Art Space, Art Est School Leichhardt. He regularly completes private commissions and sells artwork at online auction.