A spirit of celebration filled Bayside Gallery this evening with the announcement of the 2026 Bayside Painting Prize winners.
The announcement drew a large and engaged audience, reflecting the strength of Bayside's creative community, and marked the opening of the finalist exhibition for what is nationally regarded as Melbourne's premier painting prize.
Selected from 49 finalists drawn from over 500 entries, David Egan was awarded the non acquisitive Major Prize of $25,000 from a highly competitive field reflecting the breadth and diversity of contemporary Australian painting.
This year's Prize was judged by a panel of leading arts professionals, including Jacqueline Doughty, Assistant Director - Curatorial, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Dr Shelley McSpedden, Senior Curator & Head of Exhibitions, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Melbourne, and Joanna Bosse Curator, Bayside Gallery.
The judges praised the winning work, stating: "David Egan's Decreation machine rewards close looking, continuing to reveal itself over time and drawing the viewer into the many universes within its fragmented yet cohesive interior. We were taken by the way that the artist's own personal painterly language and iconography is overlaid and expanded through engagement with canons of art history, in this case, a Renaissance painting (Antonello da Messina's Pieta c. 1476). The artist's idiosyncratic approach demonstrates a deep investigation into image-making and the history of painting, which is compelling within the context of contemporary practice. The work symbolises the capacity of painting to continuously reinvent itself.
There are many intriguing painterly moments within Decreation machine, as the work shifts from tightly condensed segments through to the release of much sparser elements, with references to the body, nature, vision, abstraction, and cosmology. All elements are melded seamlessly through Egan's skilled interplay of abstraction and figuration, the compartmentalised nature of the composition allowing for different densities of pictorial treatment."
David Egan, Decreation machine 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist
Beckett Local Prize winner
The $10,000 acquisitive Beckett Local Prize was awarded to Betra Fraval for Taking flight, with the work to be acquired into the Bayside City Council Art and Heritage Collection.
The judges stated "We commend the restraint and skill in mark-making evident in Betra Fraval's delicate, intuitive painting Taking flight. Sometimes, one of the most important skills for an artist is to know when the painting is complete - to have the confidence not to overwork the image. Fraval demonstrates this artfully in Taking flight. The spaciousness and lightness of the artist's touch allows the paint to remain visible - soaking and bleeding into the linen ground. The painting provides lyrical prompts to the viewer, each compositional element a proposition for narrative that is neither obvious or prescribed. The quiet resonance of Taking flight opens space for the viewer's own imaginative interpretation."
Betra Fraval, Taking flight 2025, oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne
Exhibition details
The 2026 Bayside Painting Prize finalist exhibition features 49 artists, both established and emerging, and is on view at Bayside Gallery from 1 May to 14 June 2026.
Visitors are invited to vote for the $1,000 People's Choice Award, announced at the close of the exhibition on 14 June 2026.
More about the Bayside Painting Prize
