Image: Heide Museum of Modern Art, BULLEEN
Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen has announced 'Always Modern: Radical Nurture', an exhibition that looks back at the institution’s early role in fostering Australian modernism. The show is scheduled for 10 February to 13 September 2026 at Heide Cottage, and is described by the museum as a reflection on Heide as both a home and a catalyst for creative change.
According to the exhibition text, the project returns to the early decades of Heide, when art and life came together in “radical and intimate ways.” The museum says that, alongside founders John and Sunday Reed, artists who gathered there challenged societal expectations through the ways they lived as well as the work they made. Rather than adopting accepted notions of family life, they formed what the museum describes as an unconventional community bound by shared ideals, friendship and creative exchange.
The exhibition positions Heide as a testing ground for “new ways of living, loving and creating.” In the museum’s account, the Reeds offered encouragement, space and at times financial support to artists whose ideas were often misunderstood elsewhere. That support, the exhibition argues, helped create the conditions in which Australian modernism could take root and flourish.
'Always Modern: Radical Nurture' is one of several exhibitions Heide has highlighted for 2026, but it is the one most directly tied to the museum’s own history. The current material places the show in Heide Cottage, distinguishing it from other forthcoming exhibitions that will appear in Heide Main Galleries, the Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery and the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery. The institution’s newsletter presents the exhibition as part of a broader year of programming, but the focus here is specifically on the Heide story and its legacy.
The exhibition page also indicates that Sidney Nolan’s 'Blue Figure' is featured in the display image for the show. Beyond that, the verified source material does not list the full checklist of works or a detailed object inventory, so the museum’s published framing remains the clearest guide to the show’s scope: a historical reflection on the social and creative culture that formed around Heide in its formative years.
Lily Mora is listed as guest curator. Admission is included with museum entry. The exhibition is currently published with dates of 10 February to 13 September 2026 on the museum’s exhibition page, while the newsletter text also refers to it as running from 10 February to 9 August 2026. The more specific exhibition page date range of 10 February to 13 September 2026 is the latest verified listing in the source material.
Heide Museum of Modern Art, located at 7 Templestowe Road in Bulleen, continues to use its exhibition program to connect present-day audiences with the histories that shaped the museum and its reputation. For 'Always Modern: Radical Nurture', that means returning to the place where the Reeds’ domestic and artistic experiment became inseparable from the development of a distinctly Australian modernist culture.
