‘Meteorwrongs’ and murder at sea: Meet Australia’s next generation of artists

What decides which stories survive, and what happens to the objects and memories pushed into history’s rubbish bin? Those questions shape Primavera 2026, an exhibition of Australian artists aged 35 or younger.

Curator Antares Wells visited studios and galleries in every Australian state and territory while selecting the six artists. She found a recurring interest in archives and records of the past. Wells calls this preoccupation “traces”: artists pick up relics, overlooked material and discarded stories, then make something new from them.

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When you visit that many artists, five different exhibitions could come out of that.

The six artists approach the idea from different directions, but the exhibition repeatedly asks why certain things are valued while others are ignored. Wells describes Primavera as an experience for both the head and the heart. Even works that look sleek or detached, she says, contain a human story. She hopes visitors leave with a sense of the vitality and diversity of contemporary Australian art, as well as the richness of the human stories around them.

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But I identified a preoccupation with what I’ve called traces; an interest in the relics of the past, picking them up and making something new with them.

Callum McGrath’s History Piece examines a queer love triangle that ended with the stabbing death of 19-year-old naval stoker John “Jack” Joseph Riley aboard HMAS Australia II in 1942. The case led to complicated and often opaque legal proceedings.

McGrath has often explored queer history, but authorities initially suppressed that element of the story. Riley reportedly confessed to the ship’s surgeon while being treated for stab wounds before his death. The confession letter did not appear in the court proceedings, though McGrath eventually found a copy in the archives. He says its exclusion from the hearings “speaks volumes.”

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It’s not a cold, big, bad archive. There’s a human heart beating in all of these works, even the ones that seem very sleek and detached.

The artist reframes the case through queer history, power and politics. His multimedia work layers images and text, presenting evidence as an accumulation rather than a neat conclusion. History Piece turns a murder case and a buried confession into a study of what official records leave out, and what later artists recover.

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The fact that the letter was left out of the court hearings on the boat, I think, speaks volumes.