The Gold Award 2026

4 July - 6 September 2026

Gallery 2.2 | Free

Rockhampton Museum of Art is proud to present its much-anticipated acquisitive painting prize, The Gold Award in 2026. This invitational award showcases the finest in contemporary Australian painting practice, with the most outstanding work to be acquired into Rockhampton Museum of Art’s nationally significant collection, judged by renowned artist Jenny Watson.

The Gold Award 2026 Artists

Lydia Balbal (b. 1958, Mangala, Region: Broome)

Lydia Balbal is a Mangala woman, her country is near Punmu in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Lydia first began painting in 2007, her works explore jila (living water) located near the Percival Lakes. Lydia now lives between Broome and Bidydanga, in 2014 she won the General Painting Award at The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards.

Photo: Courtesy of Short St Gallery

Betty Chimney (b. 1957 Port Augusta, SA, Yankunytjatjara)

Betty Chimney was born in Port Augusta and grew up in Coober Pedy before coming to live in Indulkana as a young girl.

Betty Chimney is a long-time artist and director of Iwantja Arts. A dedicated painter, Betty’s work is inspired by her ancestral Yankunytjatjara country and a determination to maintain her strong connection to country and culture.

Photo: Portrait of Betty Chimney at Iwantja Arts, Indulkana. Photograph by Lisa Hatzimihail, courtesy of Country Style magazine and Michael Reid Sydney+ Berlin.

Wayilkpa Maymuru (Homeland Djarrakpi, Clan: Maŋgalili, Moiety: Yirritja, lives and works in Yirrkala North East Arnhem Land, NT)

Wayilkpa Maymuru is a Yolŋu artist of the Maŋgalili clan and a member of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre.  The artist's work references the settlement of her homeland Djarrakpi by ancestral heroes, telling their story of death, rest and rebirth to the sky. Wayilkpa is a descendant of a family of important artists, in 2018, inspired by her artistic family Wayikpa began focusing on her own practice.

Photo: Courtesy of Buku Larrŋgay-Mulka Centre

Karla Marchesi (b. 1984 Brisbane, lives Berlin, Germany)

Brisbane-born, Berlin-based artist Karla Marchesi has Bachelor of Fine Art (2004) and Honours in Fine Art (2007) degrees from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Marchesi’s work refracts the social-cultural anxieties of our age, critiquing what it means to be human at this present moment. She interweaves allegoric deconstruction of ideological systems with autobiography, pathos and humour.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist, by Dale Grant

David Paulson (b. 1944 Leeds, UK)

Having received formal art training in Sydney and Tasmania, David has established himself as a master draughtsman with a longstanding reputation as a teacher of life drawing. Although David works predominantly in oil painting, his classical understanding and contemporary reading both of the figure and the landscape remains the foundation for his art and ideology.

Photo: Courtesy of Mick Richards

Lorna Quinn (b. 1995 Melbourne, lives London)

Lorna Quinn earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours at Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. Early successes in her career have included receiving awards, completing large-scale public artwork and exhibiting in a number of group exhibitions and art prizes. She is the recipient of an Ian Potter Travel Grant (2024), a Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, and the Marten Bequest Travelling scholarship (2024).

Telly Tu’u (b. Wellington NZ, lives Sydney)

Telly Tu’u is a Sydney-based artist, born in Wellington New Zealand. Culture is a seminal part of the artist’s practice, drawn from his Samoan, Chinese, Tokelau and Tuvalu heritage. His atmospheric abstract works call upon references including the Samoan Pe’a (tattoo) or Tapa cloth, which comprise patterns abstracted from nature.

Photo: Telly Tu’u, courtesy of the artist and James Makin Advisory

Tricky Walsh (lives Melbourne and Virginia, USA)

Increasingly working with the language of speculation as a political and philosophical tool to imagine alternative pathways and worldviews, they use a diversity of media (architecture, painting, sculpture, installation, radio, augmented reality, animation, text) to configure their narrative embedded works and installations.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Guest Judge: Jenny Watson

Jenny Watson is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists whose conceptual painting practice spans more than four decades. In 2022, Watson was in the group exhibition Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery with a group of 48 new paintings on proofs of the exhibition catalogue from her 2016 survey exhibition Chronicles at Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane. (Biography courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery)

Photo: Jenny Watson, Chandirgarh, India. Photo by Andrew Wilson. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney

Image: Rosella Namok (b. 1979) Old Gals Yarnin’ I-III 2023, acrylic on canvas, 225 x 90cm each. Rockhampton Museum of Art Collection. Winner of the Gold Award 2024. Gift of the Moya Gold Trust through Rockhampton Museum of Art Gift Fund 2024. © The artist and FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane