Image: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
The Art Gallery of Western Australia will open ‘All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains’ on 1 August, presenting the first solo exhibition by Western Australian artist Stormie Mills at an Australian state gallery. The free exhibition runs at AGWA in Perth until 8 November and brings together a new body of work shaped by Mills’ long relationship to street art, public space and gallery display.
AGWA says the exhibition marks a significant milestone in Mills’ career, which began in 1984 and has since extended from street walls into galleries and public spaces worldwide. The gallery describes him as a defining figure in Australian street art and says his practice has played a pivotal role in shifting public perceptions of the medium from underground graffiti to a recognised contemporary art form. The exhibition is curated by Isobel Wise, AGWA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, and is supported by The Spinifex Trust.
The new works reflect themes that have long structured Mills’ practice, including isolation, tenderness, resilience and the human condition. According to AGWA, the artist works with a restrained palette of black, white, grey and silver, and his imagery is intended to communicate quiet vulnerability and hope. The exhibition is presented as a body of recent and new work that draws on Mills’ global movements, personal history and the people and places he has encountered.
A central feature of the show is two monumental 12-metre-long paintings, one referencing the ocean and the other the mountains. AGWA says these works place Mills’ subjects in dialogue with elemental, often extreme environments, and use expansive scenes of turbulent seas, towering peaks and void-like spaces to echo the duality of his lived experience. The gallery also links the exhibition to the artist’s early years, noting that painting gave him continuity during a difficult and unstable period of life.
In the gallery’s framing, ‘All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains’ is also about storytelling and shared emotional experience. AGWA says Mills wanted to connect intimately with others through painting and through the stories embedded in the work. The exhibition title, the artist’s own statement on the site explains, emerged from an initial interest in secrets and how they are held, including the idea that they can be located within the body.
Mills’ practice has been built around distinctive characters and a reduced colour range, and AGWA’s exhibition text presents this as part of a broader body of work that has found audiences across cultures and continents. The gallery notes that his work has resonated through a combination of emotional directness and visual restraint, while his career has moved from street interventions to a widely collected practice. The exhibition arrives alongside a guided tour series titled ‘Stormie Mills | Guided Tours’, scheduled for Thursdays at 1pm from 1 August to 8 November 2026.
AGWA’s July newsletter places the exhibition among a busy winter program, but the Mills project is the headline art event tied to the August opening. The gallery states that ‘All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains’ opens Saturday 1 August and remains on view until 8 November 2026 at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.
