'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.
Led by Charlotte Ivey (abstract artist) and Lana Daubermann (landscape artist), these workshops are designed to inspire painters from beginners to those with more experience. This series of six fortnightly workshops can be booked individually, or as a complete set. All materials are supplied, so all you need to do is turn up (in clothing you don't mind getting paint on!), and be ready to explore.
“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.
The acclaimed musical returns to Melbourne this July-August starring music theatre luminaries Helen Dallimore ('Wicked' and 'Legally Blonde') and Deidre Rubenstein ('My Fair Lady' and 'Shakespeare in Love') as the legendary mother daughter duo, Big and Little Edith (Edie) Bouvier Beale. This new production will be directed by Tyran Parke ('Elegies: A Song Cycle' and 'Ordinary Days') and presented by Clovelly Fox and fortyfivedownstairs.
In 'Now: Embodied Expressions', eight women artists offer works shaped by years of life, practice and attention. Their art holds the textures of experience while remaining vividly present. Each work invites us into a moment where seeing and making meet.
Following multiple 2025 Green Room Award wins, local eccentrics Pummel Squad are back with a new play about shame, delusion, and the tyranny of normalcy. What starts as one man’s humiliating journey to get his nose back becomes a cacophony of tall-tales, testimonies, disputes and non-sequiturs that’ll all wrap up neatly in the end, they promise. Directed by Katy Maudlin ('Meet Me At Dawn', MTC), 'Marginalia' is a hilarious look at the feelings we push to the margins, and the foibles that are as obvious as the nose on your face.
This exhibition celebrates the long-standing friendship between artists Sal Cooper and Trudy Clutterbok, showcasing the ongoing dialogue in their respective studio practices. Both artists explore the intimate landscapes of history, love, memory, and experience.
Victoria McCaffrey's exhibition explores mark making as a form of storytelling, where every line, gesture, and trace carries emotion, memory, and intention, inviting viewers to bring their own interpretations and narratives to each work. The artist presents marks as enduring records of presence, meaning, and shared experience across time.
Passion. Politics. Power. Set against the backdrop of empire and ambition, Cleopatra & Antony's fateful romance unfolds with devastating intensity in a visceral fusion of rich language and sharp, contemporary direction from Sonya Suares ('The Lucky Country', Lawler Theatre). Melbourne Shakespeare Company follows a string of acclaimed productions at fortyfivedownstairs – 'Julius Caesar', 'Hamlet' and 'Othello' – with a gripping, modern take on one of the Bard’s great tragedies.
Barbara Rozenes' exhibition reflects a lifelong journey of caring, advocacy and devotion to family, culminating in a rediscovery of self through art. Through expressive portraits, still lifes and works in oil and watercolour, she celebrates the freedom, joy and renewal she has found in painting, capturing the stories, beauty and humanity that continue to inspire her.
'Twin' is a collaborative exhibition by twin sisters Anne Dash and Emma Dash. Working across painting, embroidery and sequinned textile, the project approaches twinhood not as duplication but as relation - shaped through closeness and exchange.
'sex death country' brings together new paintings and sculptures by Ian Bracegirdle and Ponch Hawkes.
Ian Bracegirdle is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with natural and geopolitical landscapes. In this exhibition, these themes evolve into the personal and singular in the form of large-scale portraits looking at friendship, masculinity and invisibility, alongside sculptural works addressing diaspora, dispossession and conflict.
Celebrated photographer Ponch Hawkes makes her first foray into painting with a new body of work centred on the symbolic figure of the bear. Inspired by the animal’s capacity for hibernation and its remarkable ability to maintain bone density and muscle mass while dormant, Hawkes explores the bear as a figure that moves between waking and dreaming worlds.
Submissions are now open for fortyfivedownstairs' sixth annual community-sourced exhibition of small works: SMALL!. Entries close Monday 9 November, 5pm.
ALL REMAINING PERFORMANCES OF BALLKIDS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED
Holly and Sam share a dream – to join the most elite squad in competitive summer sport: ballkids at the Australian Open. Funny, moving and excruciatingly human, 'Ballkids' opens with a chance encounter and jump-cuts through the next two decades of Holly and Sam’s shared life together. Following rave reviews (★★★★★ The Age) and a Green Room Award win for Best New Writing for Liv Satchell, VIMH ('The Grief Trilogy') are bringing back this smash hit of Melbourne Fringe 2024, directed by Julian Dibley-Hall ('The View From Up Here', Theatreworks).
Kate’s practice has long been focused on the symmetry and beauty of natural forms. In distilling plants and landscapes to their essence, she finds order in a disordered world. The works in 'Cosmic Forms' are meditations on order within disorder, examining our connection with all living things - from plants, to animals, to each other.
‘PRIMARY INSTINCTS’ is an annual thematic group exhibition presented by the Polish Art Foundation. In a world increasingly mediated by technology, systems, and rational frameworks, the exhibition invites artists to interpret the idea of ‘Primary Instincts’ and consider what remains immediate, embodied, and unfiltered.
Established nearly five decades ago, the Polish Art Foundation supports artists of Polish heritage in Australia while fostering artistic exchange and dialogue across Polish, Australian, and multicultural communities.
Xavier meets Sebastian in high school. They instantly hit it off, but it doesn't take long for things to get complicated. Moving through university and into the real world, Xavier fumbles through relationships and friendships, continuing to orbit Sebastian, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar. Presented by fortyfivedownstairs as part of the 2026 Fringe Festival, Margot Morales ('And She Would Stand Like This', Antipodes Theatre) directs the Melbourne premiere of Eric Jiang's funny and touching play about the unexpected forms love takes.