In the grand tradition of European art history, high-res lighting, dramatic perspective, and classical archetypes were long deployed as visual instruments of state authority, divine right, and imperial conquest. High art served as the ultimate ledger of who commanded power and who remained submissive in the background.
Marri Ngarr artist Ryan Presley flips that historical script completely.
By securing the prestigious $100,000 AUD (£52,000) Telstra Art Award at the 43rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), Presley has delivered a defining statement for contemporary First Nations practice. His winning oil painting, our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed (2026), subverts the visual vocabulary of the Old Masters to stage a radical intervention in Australia’s ongoing dialogue surrounding memory, sovereignty, and survival.
At first glance, Our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed strikes the eye with the theatrical weight of 16th-century Italian Mannerism. Presley explicitly draws upon Domenico Beccafumi’s The Annunciation (c. 1545), appropriating its monumental architecture, dramatic light-and-shadow play, and tight compositional geometry.
Yet where European art history routinely positioned Indigenous peoples as passive subjects or erased them entirely, Presley installs a young First Nations man directly at the center of this sacred architecture.
The composition operates through deliberate tension. A hunting rifle sits precariously in the foreground; dark, murky water pools quietly; and a distant bushfire consumes the horizon, casting an eerie, apocalyptic glow over the scene. The juxtaposition creates an atmosphere where serenity and peril, release and horror, exist in simultaneous equilibrium. Curator Shannon Brett praised the canvas as a “masterpiece,” while the judging panel highlighted its ability to hold the viewer in “affective contemplation” across past, present, and future timelines.
Presley’s engagement with European art history carries deep personal roots alongside its conceptual rigour. His grandfather trained as a sculptor in Rome before emigrating from Scandinavia to Australia in the 1960s, serving as an early mentor who introduced the artist to classical forms. Rather than viewing Western technique as an alien canon, Presley treats it as a tool to be dismantled and repurposed.
In our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed, Presley’s title draws directly from Captain James Cook’s 1770 journal entry describing Aboriginal peoples—a quote that historically justified terra nullius by framing First Nations existence as primitive and untethered from property. By reclaiming those words, Presley folds time like a spiral, forcing colonial history to account for the enduring sovereignty of the present.
Presley’s win marks his third NATSIAA appearance after finalist nods in 2016 and 2020. Standing among 64 finalists at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin, our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed signals a crucial shift in contemporary Indigenous art—one where classical techniques, digital media, and ancestral traditions exist not in opposition, but as unified avenues of resistance.
The 2026 Telstra NATSIAA finalist’s exhibition remains on view at MAGNT through 24 January 2027.