Exhibiting with COMA at this year’s Sydney Contemporary, Melbourne- and New York-based painter Renée Estée won the $25,000 acquisitive MA Art Prize for Empty Nest (we all wait for someone), 2026.
Renée Estée, Empty Nest (we all wait for someone), 2026, oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 198 × 300cm / Courtesy the artist and COMA, Sydney
With a practice that highlights mythmaking and rituals surrounding celebration, commemoration, and mourning, Estée’s winning work – a three-metre-long diptych – considers the cycles of leaving, waiting, and becoming that shape a life. Figures drift, hover, and reach across the composition as eggs, nests, and a solitary bird guide movement through a luminous yellow field; its proposition: everyone is waiting for someone.
Estée has an upcoming show at COMA titled One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, which will run 9 October to 14 November 2026.
