Melbourne Art Fair 2026

MELBOURNE ART FAIR

Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

Booth: B3

 CASSANDRA BIRD is delighted to present a solo presentation of new works by Sulman Award winning artist Gene A’Hern at Melbourne Art Fair, marking the gallery’s debut at the fair.

 Gene A’Hern’s practice is grounded in a sensitivity to place, process and material transformation. Within this new body of painted work, A’Hern constructs layered surfaces that oscillate between abstraction and landscape, where memory, observation and gesture converge.

 A’Hern’s paintings are informed by an engagement with the Australian landscape not as a site to be depicted, but as a lived and felt environment. Colour, rhythm and spatial tension operate as carriers of experience, evoking shifting atmospheres and geological time rather than fixed viewpoints. Across his practice, there is a deliberate balance between control and contingency: gestural marks sit alongside carefully calibrated passages of colour, producing compositions that feel both intuitive and resolved. This dynamic reflects A’Hern’s ongoing interest in how painting can hold emotional, spatial and temporal complexity without becoming illustrative, asserting painting as a contemporary, investigative medium capable of articulating subtle relationships between self, environment and perception.

 Gene A’hern (b. 1993, Katoomba Australia) holds a B.F.A. from the National Art School, Sydney (2016). In 2025, Gene Ahern was announced as the Winner of the Sir John Sulman art prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He has held solo exhibitions in Australia, the United States, and Europe, including, Charged Memory in Hill House at Simchowitz in Los Angeles (2025), The Storm that Grew Us at Cassandra Bird, Sydney (2024); A Curtain Through the Trees at Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen (2023); and Day Pours Speech, Night Reveals Knowledge at Simchowitz, Los Angeles (2022). His work has been featured in group exhibitions internationally in Hill House at Simchowitz, Los Angeles, and Color Coded at Bode Gallery, Berlin.