Ngununggula, the Southern Highlands regional art gallery, has announced New Religion, a group exhibition bringing together contemporary Australian works, new commissions, and major historical works to explore how symbols of faith persist, evolve, and outlive belief.
Running 27 June – 18 October 2026, and featuring significant loans from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Chau Chak Wing Museum, the exhibition asks why certain images continue to hold meaning and what forms of authority they retain after systems of devotion have shifted.
Contemporary artists include Hayley Millar Baker, Nell, Johnathon World Peace Bush, Julia Robinson, and Brent Harris, with new commissions by Drew Connor Holland, Luke Thurgate, Gian Manik and Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. These are presented alongside Modernist artists Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Justin O’Brien, and historical works by William Blake, John Martin, Albrecht Dürer, Johan Wierix and Stefan Lochner, as well as an altarpiece from the Cologne School and 19th-century artefacts by Billy Smith and Charlie Eaton.
Religious images have always had a life beyond belief. Even when doctrine loosens its grip, the image remains, persisting in gesture, colour, and composition long after faith itself becomes unstable or lost. New Religion takes its starting point from this tension, placing historical and contemporary works in dialogue to consider why these images continue to hold meaning in the present.
Across the exhibition, contemporary artists respond to religious imagery and symbolic forms to consider how ideas of faith, power, and meaning are shaped today. Works reimagine traditions of devotion, morality and reverence through contemporary materials and perspectives, revealing both continuity and rupture between past and present. Historical works are presented as part of an ongoing visual language rather than fixed historical relics.
Highlights include Hayley Millar Baker’s eight-panel photographic series, which holds life and death in close proximity and reflects on mortality and ritual. Johnathon World Peace Bush’s ochre-on-linen icons draw on devotional imagery while raising questions of inheritance and sacred space. Gian Manik’s new work responds to Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights to examine queer male desire and representation, while Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro relocate the sacred into space junk, suggesting worship has migrated into contemporary forms. Julia Robinson’s textile assemblages frame religion as theatre, and Luke Thurgate presents a new large-scale wall drawing conceived as an altar, extending his interest in ritual and the sacred today.
27 June – 18 October 2026
Ngununggula
Retford Park
1 Art Gallery Lane
Bowral
New Religion continues Ngununggula’s focus on ambitious, ideas-led exhibitions in the Southern Highlands, presenting major works of national significance alongside new commissions by leading Australian artists.
