The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction in Woolloomooloo presents works from Dame Marie Bashir’s collection this May 2026.
On a quiet stretch of Cathedral Street in Woolloomooloo, where heritage brickwork meets the softened edges of Sydney’s harbour precinct, a new gallery space has begun to settle into its surroundings. Light moves differently here–filtered through tall windows, falling across timber floors that still carry the memory of the building’s past lives. In May, this space will hold a different kind of gathering: not of crowds or performance, but of works that trace the long and layered story of collecting across Country.
The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction arrives not as spectacle, but as a measured unfolding of relationships–between artists and collectors, between place and memory, and between public institutions and private lives.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction In Woolloomooloo
The gallery at 104 Cathedral Street has only recently taken shape as Art Leven’s new home, moving from Redfern into a three-storey heritage building that feels at once anchored and open. Within its rooms, preparations for the Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction carry a quiet precision.
From 15 to 19 May 2026, an accompanying exhibition will allow visitors to move slowly through works that span decades of First Nations and Australian art practice. The auction itself follows on 19 May, with a broader digital presence beginning earlier in the month.
There is a sense that the building itself is adjusting to the weight of what it will hold.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction And A Collector’s Journey
At the centre of the Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction is the private collection of Dame Marie Bashir AD CVO and Sir Nicholas Shehadie AC OBE. Their names are familiar within public life, yet here they are framed through a quieter lens: as collectors shaped by travel, conversation, and time spent in remote communities.
Works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Queenie McKenzie, Robert Campbell Jr, and many others speak not only to artistic lineage but to encounters made across decades. Some pieces carry the texture of place more literally–ochre, canvas, linen–materials that seem to hold dust from Country within their surfaces.
The collection, presented by Art Leven, reflects a journey rather than a singular vision. In this way, the Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction becomes less about acquisition and more about the slow accumulation of understanding.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction And Woolloomooloo’s New Gallery Space
Woolloomooloo has long been a place of transition. Warehouses and terraces sit alongside contemporary developments, and the harbour is never far from sight or sound. Inside Art Leven’s new premises, the scale of the building allows for pause between works, as if each piece requires its own atmosphere.
The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction will be accompanied by archival material that extends beyond the canvas: handwritten notes, early catalogues, correspondence from the 1990s, and records of early Indigenous art networks. These documents soften the boundary between artwork and context, reminding visitors that each piece exists within a wider human exchange.
It is here that the gallery’s intent becomes most visible–not to isolate works as objects, but to allow them to remain part of an ongoing conversation.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction And The Act Of Collecting
Collecting, in this context, is presented as something more porous than accumulation. The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction traces how relationships formed through travel–often to remote art centres–shaped not only collections, but understanding.
Stories of chartered flights into Country, of early gallery visits, and of cross-cultural exchange sit quietly behind the works themselves. Figures such as Elizabeth Laverty and Anne Lewis appear within this history as part of a broader network of engagement, where collecting was inseparable from listening.
In this framing, the Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction becomes a reflection on proximity–how close one can come to understanding through time, presence, and respect.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction In The Present Moment
Although the works span decades, their presence in Woolloomooloo feels immediate. Light shifts across Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Body Paint (1994), while the grounded forms in Robert Campbell Jr’s Shooting the Blacks (1987) hold a different register of tension and narrative.
The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction does not attempt to smooth these differences. Instead, it allows them to sit alongside one another, creating a field of contrast and continuity.
Visitors moving through the exhibition space in May will likely find themselves slowing down without instruction. The architecture encourages this: rooms that open and narrow, sightlines that frame and release.
Art Leven First Nations And Australian Fine Art Auction And What Remains After Viewing
By the time the auction concludes on 19 May, what remains will not be confined to the sale itself. The Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction leaves behind a quieter impression: that of accumulated attention.
There is a particular stillness that follows encounters with works of this scale and history. It is not silence in the absence of sound, but a recalibration of how sound is heard afterwards. Woolloomooloo, just beyond the gallery walls, resumes its rhythm–cars, footsteps, distant water–but the interior sense of time shifts slightly.
In that shift, the works continue to speak, though more softly.
Event Details
Art Leven First Nations and Australian Fine Art Auction
Exhibition: 15–19 May 2026
Auction: 19 May 2026
Live online bidding from: 2 May 2026
Location: Art Leven, 104 Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo, Sydney NSW
Official link: Artleven.com