Art Leven opens its new Woolloomooloo gallery with exhibitions by Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and leading First Nations sculptors, marking a new chapter for the long-standing Sydney gallery.
Morning arrives quietly along the harbour edge at Woolloomooloo. Cafés lift their shutters, delivery trucks idle along the wharf, and the sandstone terraces that step down toward the water catch the first warmth of the day. Tucked within this neighbourhood of layered histories, a new gallery space is preparing to open its doors.
On Thursday evening, the long-running Sydney gallery Art Leven will unveil its new home, marking a significant moment in its four-decade history. Formerly known as Cooee Art and previously based in Redfern, the gallery’s relocation signals both continuity and renewal – an expansion of space, but also a reaffirmation of purpose.
The inaugural program at Art Leven brings together two exhibitions that speak across generations and materials. One centres on the paintings of the Western Desert artist Mitjili Napanangka Gibson. The other gathers sculptural works created through collaborations between First Nations artists and the Brisbane-based foundry Urban Art Projects.
Together, they set the tone for what this new gallery intends to be: a place where contemporary audiences encounter stories carried through Country, memory and craft.
Art Leven Finds A New Home In Woolloomooloo
For more than forty years, Art Leven has worked closely with First Nations artists and communities across Australia. Founded in 1981, the gallery has long positioned itself as both an exhibition space and a place of dialogue – one where art is understood not only as an object but as a bearer of knowledge.
The move to Woolloomooloo offers a fresh setting for that conversation.
The new Art Leven gallery unfolds across multiple levels, including exhibition rooms designed for focused presentations and a dedicated outdoor courtyard for sculpture. The architecture is deliberately restrained: white walls, generous light and open spaces that allow artworks to speak without interruption.
From the street, the building appears quiet. Inside, the atmosphere shifts as visitors move between rooms where colour, texture and form tell stories of distant landscapes.
For director Mirri Leven, the transition to this new location is less about scale than about creating an environment where audiences can spend time with the work – looking closely, moving slowly, allowing the rhythm of each exhibition to unfold.
Art Leven Opens With The Places That Know Us
The opening exhibition at Art Leven begins with paintings that carry the memory of desert Country.
In The Places That Know Us, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson presents a series of works that map locations across the Western Desert – sites such as Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay), Winparrku and Mina Mina. These places are not depicted through conventional landscape imagery. Instead, they appear through pattern, colour and repetition.
Mitjili Napanangka Gibson’s life story sits close to the surface of these works. She was among the last Pintupi people to walk out of the desert during the late twentieth century, having grown up within a pre-contact nomadic life shaped by seasonal movement, cultural responsibility and close knowledge of Country.
When she began painting later in life, the transition from land to canvas was immediate and assured.
Her paintings move across the linen in shifting bands of colour – greens suggesting rain across salt lakes, ochres and reds recalling sandhills carried by desert winds. The compositions are rhythmic rather than descriptive. Meaning is embedded in structure rather than narrative.
Within the context of Art Leven’s opening exhibition, these works act as both introduction and anchor. They hold places that have been walked, sung and remembered over generations.
Visitors entering the gallery encounter these canvases first, their scale filling the walls with a sense of movement that feels both expansive and intimate.
Sculpture And Storytelling At Art Leven
While the paintings occupy the interior rooms, another gathering unfolds outside in the gallery courtyard.
Gatherings, the second exhibition presented by Art Leven, brings together sculptures created through collaborations between First Nations artists and Urban Art Projects. Developed through workshops during the early 2000s, these works translate carving traditions into enduring materials such as cast aluminium and bronze.
The artists represented include Craig Koomeeta, Lena Yarinkura, Jubilee Wolmby, Gary Namponan and several others whose practices originate in remote communities across northern Australia.
Many of the sculptures depict animals familiar to those landscapes – camp dogs, birds, crocodiles and other creatures that move through daily life and story alike.
In one work, a dog stands alert, its body shaped with a quiet economy of line. In another, a bird leans forward as though mid-call. Though cast in metal, the forms retain the spirit of the original carved wood objects from which they emerged.
Seen together, the sculptures reveal a meeting of knowledge systems. Traditional carving techniques meet the industrial precision of the foundry, producing works that hold both cultural continuity and new possibilities of scale and permanence.
Within the courtyard setting at Art Leven, the pieces feel almost conversational – figures placed within reach, inviting visitors to walk slowly among them.
A Continuing Story For Art Leven
Opening a new gallery is often framed as a beginning. Yet for Art Leven, the moment feels equally like an extension of a longer path.
The artists represented in these exhibitions carry stories that stretch far beyond the walls of the Woolloomooloo building. Desert salt lakes, Arnhem Land wetlands and remote community workshops all echo within the artworks now gathered here in Sydney.
What the new Art Leven space offers is a place for those stories to meet new audiences.
As visitors drift through the rooms during the opening days, the gallery fills with quiet exchanges: people standing close to a canvas, tracing the shifting colours of rain across Wilkinkarra; others stepping into the courtyard to circle a bronze crocodile or lean down to meet the gaze of a sculpted dog.
Outside, Woolloomooloo continues its steady rhythm – harbour ferries passing in the distance, afternoon light sliding across the terraces.
Inside, the works remain still but alive with movement: sand shifting, animals walking, rain crossing a salt lake somewhere far to the west.
In this new chapter for Art Leven, the gallery becomes less a destination than a meeting place – one where Country, memory and contemporary art converge in quiet conversation.
Event Details
Opening Exhibition: The Places That Know Us & Gatherings
Gallery: Art Leven
Location: Woolloomooloo, Sydney
Opening Date: Thursday, 26 March
Featured Artist: Mitjili Napanangka Gibson
Collaborating Organisation: Urban Art Projects
Official Website: https://www.artleven.com