fortyfivedownstairs is proud to present SMALL!, our fifth annual community-sourced exhibition of small works. Established artists, emerging talents, and child artists will be showcased side by side, highlighting a diverse array of styles and media. All artworks are 20 x 20 cm or smaller, priced at $150 and displayed anonymously.
Playwright Brodie Murray ('The Whisper', fortyfivedownstairs) draws on stories handed down from his grandfather and father to tell a historical thriller that explores the contrasting relationships settlers and Blak peoples have with Country, ecology, leadership and spirituality. After sold out seasons at the Castlemaine State Festival and Yirramboi Festival in 2021, 'Soul Of Possum' returns under the direction of Beng Oh and Balla Neba (movement director).
Fresh off multiple Green Room Award wins for 'Spring has Sprung or The Beautiful Show' and 'Twenty Million Thousand Leagues Under the Sea', and following the successes of 'The Owl in the Woods' and 'The Hertz Family Reunion', theatre renegades Pummel Squad are coming to fortyfivedownstairs with their third annual pantomime: a raucous celebration of death, hubris, and all we love about theatre.
In her second solo exhibition, ‘Going Where You Take Me’, Micca explores her inner world as a young Australian-Asian woman. Through intricately detailed oil paintings, she creates surreal and mystical landscapes that address themes of identity, emotion, morality, faith, relationships, and social belonging. Her work often combines whimsy with introspection, using symbolism and dreamlike imagery to convey profound emotions and meanings.
In a regional town, grief holds a group of women together. Their bond is fragile – some close, others linked more by memory than friendship. When one of their own announces his transition, loyalties splinter, old wounds reopen, and the meaning of identity and belonging is fiercely contested. Midsumma Festival presents the world premiere of MacEllen’s deeply honest and human play, directed by Kitan Petkovski ('The Inheritance') and featuring a stellar cast.
Following a sellout performance in 2024, The Highly Strung Players return to fortyfivedownstairs with two plays by award-winning author Peter Rose, who founded this absurdist troupe more than thirty years ago. These are rehearsed readings, with a changing ensemble. The Highly Strung Players began appearing at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017.
In ‘Memories; Vivid, False and Lost,’ Alison Russell maps a landscape of memory, examining the fragile, shifting and often contradictory nature of past recollections. Through a process of automatic drawing, she renders vivid or emotionally charged memories with dense colour, intensity, and strong shapes. In contrast, fragmented forms signify blurred, conflicted or lost memories, highlighting their elusive quality.
fortyfivedownstairs is now accepting expressions of interest from artists to participate in 'Punchlines', a group exhibition exploring the use of humour in contemporary art. EOI submission deadline Monday 2 March.
Cameron Grant's photography series 'Australian Theatres Unveiled' celebrates the architecture and heritage of Australia’s major theatre venues. The collection spans front-facing facades through to dressing rooms and backstage wings, featuring theatres from around the country. Each work honours the character of these venues, and the emotional history they hold for performers, patrons, and the community.
A genius with language but convinced of his own ugliness, Cyrano secretly loves the radiant Roxane, who's fallen for the beautiful but inarticulate Christian. When Cyrano offers to ghost-write his rival's seduction, he sets in motion a poignant, hilarious, and ultimately devastating love triangle. Presented by Artefact Theatre Co. and directed by Matthew Cox ('Constellations'), this radical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's masterwork by Martin Crimp features Mark Yeates in the title role alongside a cast of 16! This isn't the Cyrano you think you know.
In her exhibition ‘Independently Combining’, Celia Bridle explores themes of delicacy, intimacy, mobility, and flow through a collection of 24 drawings. The artworks feature curving and sweeping lines that reference the shapes of letters or abstract forms, mingling and weaving with overlapping flourishes. Each drawing is created gradually, building layer upon layer, to form a construction that is both mobile and intensely detailed.
'Whispers Woven in Water, Wings & Wildflowers' is an immersive art installation by Australian visual storyteller Pam Davison, presented in collaboration with couture designer Linda Britten. Combining fine art photography, couture garments, sound, and spatial design, the exhibition explores memory as something lived, embodied, and continually shaping the present.
'Liminal Fields' by Ria Green presents a series of painted works exploring the resonance and affect of the environment on the spiritual, emotional and physical self.
In his latest exhibition, 'Monumental', Mark Bo Chu observes familiar and unfamiliar scenes across Melbourne. Through his gritty and vibrant style, he highlights the magnificence and monumentality that occur at all scales across a city.
Gil is a loser. He works at McDonalds and still lives with Mother. But that’s all about to change because Gil has an ace up his sleeve: the biggest, baddest barnyard bird the world has ever seen. Following the success of 'The Crocodile' and 'Rhinoceros', Spinning Plates Co. collaborate with director Alexandra Aldrich to bring their ‘Beast Trilogy’ to its bloody, feathered conclusion with an “astonishingly entertaining” (NY Times) underdog story for our violent times. You’ve run with the rhino, wrestled the croc, now prepare thyself… it’s time for the cock.
'Summer's Rhythm' by Adele Auchterlonie captures the essence of the Australian summer as an experience that is lived and felt, rather than just observed. The collection draws inspiration from the familiar rituals that define the season. Through the use of light, texture, and mood, these artworks invite you to reconnect with the subtle richness of an Australian summer and the sense of comfort and belonging it offers.
'Punchlines' brings together 38 of Australia’s funniest artists to explore the role of humour in contemporary art. Timed to coincide with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the exhibition highlights a wide range of mediums, styles, and subject matter, united by a shared impulse to find the joke, however silly, subtle or subversive.
After an amazing partnership in 2025, Melbourne International Comedy Festival returns for another venue takeover, presenting Anisa Nandaula's No Small Talk, Chris Parker's Take a Good Hard Look at Me, JKS: a Comedy(?) by Tom Ballard, and Tape Face 20.
'Sea like a mirror' comprises a series of works on paper by Laura Williams which focus on moments of stillness within the natural environment. Each work is inspired by a memory of a specific place and being absorbed in the natural surroundings.
'Gathered' celebrates more than a decade of friendship and creative exchange between Fiona O’Byrne and Lana Daubermann. While O'Byrne’s work remains a meditation on domestic realism, Daubermann’s landscapes explore colour and atmosphere. Together, 'Gathered' is a harmony of two artistic distinct paths that continue to run side-by-side.
Curated by renowned pianist Coady Green, the 2026 festival features a distinguished lineup of musicians, an eclectic array of repertoire, and several world premieres. Shakespeare’s shadow looms large, with musical interpretations by numerous classical and contemporary composers. The two-day Melbourne Mozart Project will also be a highlight, as twelve young pianists perform Mozart’s Piano Concertos before Coady Green and Kevin Tamanini undertake the extraordinary feat of performing Mozart’s complete works for four hands and two pianos in a single day.
In 'Silence in Shadow,' Brian Reberger showcases oil paintings and photography enhanced with gold or silver leaf to capture the essence of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. His work explores the tension between light and shadow, inviting viewers to experience the moments of revelation and mystery that arise from this contrast.
In this series of photographs taken in Japan, James Bryans choses to bypass the chaos inherent in big cities, instead observing and experiencing the beauty of fleeting things and the changes of light and atmosphere.
Submissions for our 11th annual Emerging Artist Award are now closed.
For Chelle Destefano, 'Aural Transferences' is an ongoing process of exploring the memory of sound from childhood as a native Deaf-from-birth person. Destefano has been using her artistic process to meditate on those memories and to transform them into colour, line and movement.
An emerging contemporary artist, Anthea Vayonitis works with dance and meditation practices to create gesturally embodied immersive paintings. “In the silence between our heart beats” is an activation of works that includes the same titled 1.7 x 15m painting that was channelled whilst on a residency in July-August of 2025 in the Blue Mountains.
Through Sarah Ruhl’s distinctive voice, the story of Eurydice and Orpheus is retold from a female perspective, weaving memory, love and loss into a dreamlike theatrical experience. Melbourne Shakespeare Company presents this luminous, poetic reimagining of Greek mythology, directed by multi-award-winner Gary Abrahams, whose productions of 'Angels in America' and 'The Ghetto Cabaret' have become milestones at fortyfivedownstairs.
'Unicellular' originated from a research residency spanning Victoria and South Australia's western Wimmera and Limestone Coast, during which Kate Hunter gathered field recordings from subaquatic sites. The exhibition positions microscopic, non-human, single-cell organisms as active participants in an expanded attentional field. Drawing on the artist's theatre-making, performance, sound-design and painting practices, 'Unicellular' intersects personal stories with sounds and images that reflect the barely-visible and the easily overlooked.
This group exhibition showcases the work of 17 artists who are currently part of the Melbourne Studio School. Their pieces encompass a wide range of themes, from figuration to abstraction. The exhibition highlights various skills learnt through their training, including manual dexterity in mark-making, an understanding of compositional language, and an exploration of colour theory.
“Windless Night” by Kate Butler centres on a collection of ceramic sculptures inspired by the stillness, light, and movement of the night sky, as well as archetypal landmarks that help individuals orient themselves in space. Represented on a smaller scale, these motifs reflect the personal process of grounding and finding one’s orientation.
A young scholar makes the discovery of the century – letters between James Joyce and comedy legend Groucho Marx – and believes she has secured her legacy. But in the cut-throat Joyce Industry, credit rarely goes to a woman. Between The Lines is a razor sharp, wryly witty literary mystery that follows her descent into a patriarchal web of ego and academic theft. As her groundbreaking discovery is hijacked by the very mentor she trusted to protect it, truth begins to blur. Packed with intellectual gymnastics and dramatic reversals, the story asks: who gets to own history? In a world of literary giants, you can’t trust even the evidence of your own eyes…
As Diana, a trans Filipina woman in Melbourne, prepares for her wedding, her plans are derailed by the death and inconvenient return of her estranged father’s ghost, endlessly singing Mr. Big’s 1991 hit To Be With You. Presented by Tayotayo Collective in association with fortyfivedownstairs, this dark comedy from award-winning writer/performer Dax Carnay-Hanrahan ('The Six Guys an Immigrant Trans Person of Colour will Date in Melbourne', La Mama) explores gender, grief, and inheritance under the direction of Beng Oh ('Soul of Possum').
In celebration of NAIDOC week, curators E Salmon and Tre Turner have asked a selection of queer Blakfulla artists based around Narrm to showcase their work. This exhibition is a coming together, celebrating eachother, the gifts they share, the gifts they receive from their ancestors, Elders and mob, and the gifts they are yet to give.
Winner of the 2025 Sydney Fringe Festival Best in Spoken Word Award, this electrifying fusion of Indian dance, music, and spoken word confronts the unspoken realities of domestic violence within families with raw honesty, cultural depth, and courage. Shaped by the voices too often left out of the conversation, 'And What Will People Say?' challenges generational silence and invites audiences into a deeply personal journey of love, fear, shame, and resilience.
fortyfivedownstairs is proud to present the eleventh Emerging Artist Award, a prestigious award and exhibition showcasing exciting talent from emerging artists.