Ryan Presley wins Australia's main Indigenous art award

Ryan Presley has won the $100,000 top prize at the 43rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for a painting titled Our Lifestyle of Tranquillity Undisturbed. The result was reported in Artnet News's industry roundup on 7 August 2026. Presley, a Marri Ngarr artist, works in a Renaissance idiom that presents a recomposed view of the past.

The award has run for more than four decades and remains the most visible institutional marker for Indigenous art in Australia, historically associated with acrylic dot painting, bark painting and carving. Presley's win sits outside that expectation: he borrows the authority of European historical painting in order to turn it around, and the title does the rest of the work. Prizes are slow to loosen the categories they helped create. When they do, the question becomes whether artists working in traditional techniques keep their share of the visibility.