Auspicium

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is thrilled to announce Auspicium – the solo exhibition debut of 2025 National Emerging Art Prize winner Alexander Bebbington. Presented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and available to preview by request ahead of its showing in November at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, Auspicium is the culmination of a yearlong professional mentorship that formed part of Bebbington’s suite of prizes when he claimed NEAP’s ultimate accolade, the $20,000 Morgans Financial Prize for Emerging Painters, for his work Little Pied Cormorant.

“Alex really caught the attention of the judging panel last year, with his unique take on fusing painting and photography in a way that tricks the eye as to where the photography ends and the painting begins,” says NEAP’s curator and co-founder, Amber Creswell Bell. “They are at once very fresh and contemporary, but also classically nuanced. Exciting to see this work develop!”

With Auspicium – subtitled Signs, omens and the natural world – Bebbington builds on the creative breakthrough of his NEAP work with a new series of mixed-media still-life vignettes. While invoking the conventions of museum classification, spectacle and display, each of his wunderkammer-like photographic scenes is inscribed with intricately painted critters – native birds, bats, possums and insects whose nested, vital presence upends any sense of scientific remove and brings the natural world roaring to life with expressive painterly verve.

“This series builds on the visual language I established in Little Pied Cormorant, particularly the combination of photography, painting and constructed still-life environments,” says Bebbington, who meticulously constructs his photographic tableaux before painting directly onto the printed surface. “I have continued exploring the relationship between natural history, beauty and loss, using birds, insects and collected objects to create scenes that feel both familiar and slightly unsettling.”

Bebbington traces the origins of this distinctive approach to his formative encounters with the natural history collections of Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, where he became fascinated by taxidermied birds arranged against painted backdrops of their native habitats. Reversing this convention, he began introducing painted wildlife into photographed environments, developing the hybrid visual language that defines his practice today. His work draws on the seductive theatricality of Baroque still-life painting and the rich symbolism of the classical vanitas tradition, recasting these historical influences through a distinctly contemporary lens attuned to ecological fragility and the consequences of human intervention.

Beneath the vivid colour and artifice of Auspicium lies a disquieting meditation on preservation and loss. Bebbington is drawn to the paradox of the natural history museum – a place dedicated to conserving and celebrating the living world, yet filled with specimens removed from the environments that sustained them. His compositions carry something of this contradiction, with their beguiling beauty shadowed by a sense of absence and the possibility that the creatures we seek to preserve might one day survive only as objects of study.

“There is something surreal and beautiful about these spaces, but that beauty is accompanied by a deep sense of sadness,” says Bebbington. “I think these spaces are fundamental to preserving our natural history and crucial to education, but we don’t want them to be the last place a species is held.”

The new series also marks a significant development in the scale and ambition of Bebbington’s practice, with larger, more commanding works that push the possibilities of his mixed-media process. Together, these individual tableaux form a richly layered reflection on the ways we encounter, interpret and value the natural world.

Taking its title from the Latin term associated with the ancient practice of interpreting omens through the observation of birds, Auspicium invites a different kind of augury – one in which the fate of the natural world might be read in the creatures surrounding us and in their enmeshment with our domestic habitat. Marking an auspicious beginning for Bebbington’s exhibition career within the Michael Reid fold, Auspicium heralds the arrival of a distinctive new voice, uniting technical ingenuity, visual exuberance and an urgent environmental consciousness.

For previews, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au.