As featured in The Australian, we are thrilled to announce that Australian artist Renée Estée is the winner of the 2026 MA Art Prize, with her work 'Empty Nests (we all wait for someone). Presented by MA Financial Group, the $25,000 acquisitive Prize is presented to one early-career artist showcasing work at Sydney Contemporary.
Estée’s practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. This diptych considers the cycles of leaving, waiting and becoming that shape a life. Figures drift, hover and reach across the composition as nests, eggs and a solitary bird guide movement through a luminous yellow field that functions simultaneously as landscape, shelter and shared ground. An empty nest sits beside one figure while another shelters a single egg, holding absence and possibility within the same landscape. At its heart is the simple proposition that everyone is waiting for someone.
Read the full interview here.
